Abstract
This study examined institutional preparedness for access to higher education by students with disabilities in five private universities in Nairobi County, Kenya, an under-studied sector, examining how policies and practices support access, retention and completion; how physical and learning environment accessibility shapes that access; and how attitudes, staff preparedness and support systems shape inclusion across intersecting student identities. Students with disabilities were treated throughout as heterogeneous by impairment type, gender and socio-economic position rather than as a single diagnostic category, with physical infrastructure and the learning environment adopted as the accessibility domains that condition access whatever the impairment. The study employed a convergent parallel mixed-methods design combining a faculty survey (n = 96), an independently scored observation checklist, interviews (37 students with disabilities, 15 administrators) and five focus groups (n = 45). A 52.8-percentage-point gap separated faculty (90.6%) from student (37.8%) awareness of the same policies; positive attitudes did not translate into preparedness, accessibility was weakest in digital and assistive technology provision, and training emerged as the strongest lever for both awareness and preparedness. The study contributes an Integrated Institutional Preparedness and Inclusion Model and a governance pathway from symbolic compliance to social transformation. The five, already-committed private sites and reliance partly on self-report bound the claims to a transferability scope rather than statistical generalisation. Because training was the strongest predictor of preparedness yet rated least effective in practice, . universities should prioritise mandatory disability inclusion training and use systematic monitoring to link policy, institutional practice and student experience.