Abstract: At the time of Ghana’s independence in 1957, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah was confident that sovereignty would bring economic and social development in its wake. The country’s later struggle for national development has attracted much attention from researchers, who have covered a broad range of topics including economic growth, political change, education, and health care. The voluminous and ever-growing body of research, however, has ignored Nkrumah’s national disability program, despite its significance for a large minority of the Ghanaian population. In this article we analyze the origins and legacy of this program, from the formation of Ghana’s first disability organizations in the 1950s to the government’s ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2012. We conclude by offering reflections on current efforts by Ghanaian disability activists to secure those rights for disabled Ghanaians across the country.