CLSI- Advocacy Support to PWDs in Lagos Starting from Lagos, a grassroots network of persons living with disabilities (PLWDs) has come together in recent years to tackle systemic discrimination and human rights abuses they face as PLWDs who are also ethnic/linguistic minorities in the city # arewas or persons from northern Nigeria. The grassroots network, called the Physically Challenged Empowerment Initiative (PCEI) has thousands of members from across Lagos, encompassing both the physically challenged and the blind arewa communities. The coordinator of the movement is a community paralegal trained by Justice <(>&<)> Empowerment Initiatives # Nigeria (JEI), who is using his paralegal and community organizing skills to support this extremely marginalized and vulnerable population to defend and advocate for their rights and voice their demand for needed changes in urban policy and practice.

Under our first VOICE Empowerment Grant, #From Rights to Realities: Training Grassroots Network of PLWD Paralegals to Access Services and Fully Participate in Urban Planning,# which commencedin March 2018, JEI is training two classes of urban poor PLWDs and supporting them to render grassroots legal aid to their communities. These paralegals are educating their peers and defending them before the Lagos Mobile Court, assisting PLWDs to register with the Lagos Office of Disability Affairs (LASODA) to access social entitlements, among others.

This influencing project builds on the early successes of our VOICE Empowerment Grant by providing trained urban poor PLWD paralegals and other PCEI members with additional skills and tools to directly participate in urban planning and advocate for policy changes to build more inclusive Nigerian cities. As PCEI members move into new technical areas, we will leverage the natural alliance and foster the mutual support relationship between the PCEI network and the broader movement of the urban poor called the Nigerian Slum/Informal Settlement Federation, which already has teams of skilled grassroots volunteers in the three areas of endeavour into which PCEI wants to grow its efforts under thisproject:

(1) Using tablets and a mobile survey application, PCEI members work with the Federation#s profiling/data team to document their urban environment # capturing physical and non-physical #barriers# to their effective participation in the city. Maps of these barriers will serve as jumping off-points for public conversations around accessibility of Nigerian cities to urban poor PLWDs.

(2) Complementing the grassroots documentation of barriers, JEI will train a technical team of PCEI members focused on policy to assess and break down the various laws and policies affecting urban poor PLWDs in Nigerian cities. This technical team will work with the Federation#s policy advocacyteam to formulate specific advocacy goals and develop and implement advocacy strategies to create more pro-poor and inclusive urban policy and planning.

(3) In support of the advocacy work and to create broader awareness and culturechange of inclusion, PCEI members will be trained and work with the Federation#s media team to create their own videos and audio pieces to bring the voices of urban poor PLWDs into the halls of power and public venues across Nigerian cities to foster dialogue around urban inclusion.

(4) To tackle the push-factors that result in migration and trafficking of Arewa PLWDs to Lagos from Northern Nigeria, PCEI members will use the documentation, policy analysis, and media outputs in advocacy visits to government officials of the primary #sending# states in Northern Nigeria