Corporate organisations should move beyond one-off donations and charity-driven interventions and invest in systems that make their products, services and workplaces genuinely accessible to persons with disabilities, disability-inclusion strategist Tamara Ajasa has said.
Ajasa, founder of The Wholesome Parent, made the call during a PWDSpotlight X Space on “Raising Children with Disabilities: The Role of Parents, Communities and Society in Building an Inclusive Future,” where she challenged companies to rethink how they use corporate social responsibility (CSR) resources for disability inclusion.
Her argument was straightforward: disability inclusion should not be reduced to occasional acts of charity.
“It’s not about charities. It’s not about going to give a bag of rice in a home of the disabled,” Ajasa said. “No. Beyond that, how can you create structure? How can you design systems that actually help?”
The intervention came during a wider conversation about the challenges faced by families raising children with disabilities, but Ajasa deliberately expanded the discussion beyond parenting.
For her, the responsibility for inclusion cannot rest primarily on parents, disability organisations or persons with disabilities themselves. Businesses, she argued, have resources, platforms and institutional capacity that can be directed towards creating lasting change.
From charity to systems
Ajasa questioned the sustainability of corporate interventions that provide immediate material relief without addressing the structural barriers that continue to affect persons with disabilities and their families.
She pointed to the scale of corporate spending on initiatives and asked why disability inclusion should not receive a more deliberate share of those resources.
“Multinationals spend billions of dollars in initiatives,” she said, asking where the equivalent commitment to disability inclusion was.
Her proposal is not necessarily for companies to abandon charitable giving. Rather, she argued for a shift towards interventions capable of producing continuing value.
Instead of simply providing food or other temporary assistance, companies could design financial products, services and programmes that take the needs of persons with disabilities into account.
She gave the example of financial institutions developing services that are intentionally inclusive rather than treating disability as an occasional beneficiary category.
The distinction is important: charity responds to an immediate need, while an inclusive system can alter the conditions that repeatedly produce exclusion.
What would meaningful corporate inclusion look like?
Ajasa’s comments point towards a different understanding of CSR—one in which disability inclusion becomes part of how a company operates and delivers value rather than something added occasionally to its philanthropic activities.
During the conversation, she suggested that businesses should be encouraged to champion disability inclusion through incentives from government.
One of her three major asks was for government to provide incentives to corporate organisations that invest in disability-inclusive systems. She specifically mentioned the possibility of tax or revenue reductions for banks and other businesses that provide inclusive products and services.
Such an approach, she argued, could encourage more organisations to view disability inclusion as an investment rather than an obligation or charitable expense.
It would also create a possible link between public policy and private-sector innovation: government could establish incentives, while companies could develop products, services and workplace practices that remove barriers for people with disabilities.
Families need more than sympathy
The corporate responsibility argument was closely connected to the central issue of the X Space: what happens to families raising children with disabilities?
Ajasa described the financial and emotional pressures that can accumulate over years.
Some families must navigate assessments, therapy, specialised education and medication, with costs that can continue for long periods. She argued that government should make education, therapy and special-needs support free or highly subsidised because the lifetime costs can become overwhelming for families.
She gave an example of medication costs increasing from about ₦9,000 per month to ₦50,000 per month, illustrating the kind of recurring expense families may face. The figures were presented as an example from her discussion rather than as a broader statistical estimate.
Against this background, corporate interventions that offer only short-term relief may do little to address the deeper pressures confronting families.
A bag of food may help for a period. But an accessible financial service, affordable therapy programme, inclusive insurance product, accessible workplace or sustained education initiative can potentially address a barrier repeatedly encountered by families.
The missing question in CSR
Ajasa’s challenge also raises a question about how companies define the beneficiaries of their social investments.
Disability is often treated as a specialist issue, handled through occasional donations to disability organisations or targeted campaigns. But her argument suggests that disability should be considered across the entire corporate ecosystem.
That could include how customers access banking services, how employees with disabilities are supported, how digital platforms are designed, how physical spaces are made accessible and how corporate programmes reach families.
The PWDSpotlight moderator similarly stressed during the conversation that the platform seeks to expose issues affecting persons with disabilities and move public discussion away from pity towards systems and solutions. The discussion also touched on the accessibility of venues and the practical barriers that can prevent persons with disabilities from participating fully in society.
The implication is that inclusion should be measured not simply by how much an organisation gives away, but by how many barriers its resources help remove.
Inclusion cannot depend on the goodwill of a few
Ajasa’s position also reflects a broader concern about sustainability. Where disability support depends primarily on individual donations or periodic charity, access can become unpredictable. Families may receive assistance during a particular campaign but continue facing the same barriers after the campaign ends.
A systems-based approach, by contrast, seeks to embed inclusion into institutions.
For example, a bank could design accessible financial services as part of its normal operations. A company could incorporate accessibility into its recruitment and workplace systems. A technology firm could make accessibility a standard component of product development. A corporate foundation could fund long-term disability inclusion programmes rather than only short-term relief.
Ajasa’s emphasis during the X Space was that organisations have the capacity to think beyond immediate intervention.
Corporate Nigeria as part of the solution
The challenge to corporate organisations comes at a moment when disability inclusion is increasingly being discussed in terms of participation, accessibility and rights rather than charity alone.
Ajasa’s own work through The Wholesome Parent reflects this broader approach. She explained that the organisation works with corporate organisations to design and execute disability-inclusive initiatives with measurable value, while also running a mentorship programme for mothers, primarily in Nigeria with some participants in the diaspora.
Her experience therefore informed her emphasis on measurable and sustainable intervention.
For companies, the question is not simply whether they have supported a disability programme. It is whether their investments have helped change the conditions under which persons with disabilities and their families live, work, study and participate.
That requires companies to see persons with disabilities not merely as recipients of assistance, but as customers, employees, entrepreneurs, professionals, parents and citizens whose needs should be reflected in the design of mainstream systems.
Beyond the “feel-good” intervention
The language of charity can sometimes make disability inclusion appear benevolent: a company gives, a beneficiary receives, and the story ends.
Ajasa’s intervention disrupts that model. Her call is for organisations to ask harder questions about the systems surrounding their interventions.
If a company gives a child with a disability educational materials but its own digital platform cannot be navigated by a blind customer, what has inclusion meant within that organisation?
If a bank sponsors a disability event but its services remain inaccessible to some customers, where does the responsibility begin and end?
If a corporation supports a one-day awareness campaign but does not examine accessibility within its own workplace, how sustainable is the intervention?
Ajasa did not present these questions as a formal corporate scorecard during the conversation. Rather, her broader argument was that companies should move from temporary charity towards structures that produce continuing benefits for persons with disabilities and their families.
Building inclusion into the system
Her three-part call—to strengthen respite care, incentivise corporate disability inclusion, and make education and therapy more affordable—places families at the centre of a much wider ecosystem of responsibility.
Government has a role in creating policy and incentives. Businesses have resources and institutional reach. Schools shape children’s experiences and attitudes. Communities influence whether families feel supported or isolated. And parents, Ajasa argued, should not be left to carry the responsibility alone.
