Inclusion as Innovation: Disability Justice, Digital Transformation, and the Capability to Be an Academic in African Higher Education

Abstract

Digital transformation now shapes how students and staff access teaching, assessment, library systems, and academic work in universities. Yet accessibility is still often treated as an after-the-fact accommodation rather than as a design and quality principle. This article offers a critical narrative synthesis of recent literature on disability inclusion and digital accessibility in higher education, with a particular focus on African higher education and clear relevance to East Africa. The main review corpus comprised 23 sources published between 2021 and 2026, supplemented by three foundational texts used for conceptual framing. We define the capability to be an academic as the substantive freedom to access, produce, communicate, and have one's academic work recognised within teaching, learning, research, and institutional life. Framed in this way, the concept is not a relabelling of inclusion. It links disability justice's concern with power, collective access, and disabled leadership to the capability approach's concern with whether resources become real opportunities. Five recurring mechanisms emerged from the synthesis: structurally inaccessible digital ecosystems; staff capability gaps in producing accessible educational materials; governance and quality assurance arrangements that treat accessibility as peripheral; compliance-driven accommodation processes that reproduce dependency and academic ableism; and institution-level practices that recast inclusion as innovation through disability-led governance, universal design, and coordinated accessibility workflows. The discussion shows that it is not the presence of a platform, but the outcome of increased access to real opportunities by universities to permit disabled students and personnel to become full-functioning academics that should measure digital transformation. The article ends with some implications on the procurement, staff development, quality assurance, and disability led institutional governance in African universities.