Al-Hikmah University Journal

This paper investigated inclusive education as a strategy for widening girls’ access to secondary education with implications for gender equality in South-South Nigeria. Three research questions and three hypotheses were answered and tested in the study. Design adopted for the study was descriptive survey while the population of the study was 7,662 respondents comprising 286 principals and 7376 teachers while 380 respondents consisting of 13 principals and 367 teachers were sampled for the study using stratified ransom sampling technique. Instrument used for data gathering was a 15-item questionnaire titled “Inclusive Education for Gender Equality Questionnaire” (IEGEQ) which was face and content validated by two experts in Measurement and Evaluation at Rivers State University. Cronbach alpha was used for determining the reliability of the questionnaire with an index of 0.90. There were 380 copies of questionnaire administered out of which 355 copies representing 93.4% were retrieved. Research questions raised were answered using mean and standard decision while the hypotheses were tested using z-test at 0.05 level of significance. The result of the study showed that financial cost, attitude of educational stakeholders and lack of gender friendly resources are factors limiting girl child education. It was also revealed that achieving gender equality will require stakeholders’ participation, shared educational vision among others. It was recommended that government need to put in place punitive measures that will criminalise failing to educate the girl child.