Education is undoubtedly critical to human development. Sadly, the scourge of out of school children has remained seemingly intractable in spite of several intervention programmes by the federal government and donor agencies.
The plight of many children in Nigeria, have continued to generate concerns among stakeholders. Currently, Nigeria is ranked as having the highest number of out of school children in the world, with over 10 million children reportedly roaming the street.
However, in recent times, issues such as insurgency, conflicts, unrest, deep-rooted poverty, and certain cultural factors have led to an increase in the number of out of school children, especially in the northern part of the country.
The Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, while featuring in the State House Ministerial Briefing on august 18th, 2022, said the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria has dropped from an estimated 13 million to 6.9 million.
Adamu said the achievement was recorded largely due to the activities of the Better Education Service Delivery for All (BESDA) and the cooperation of some of the frontline states like Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto, Gombe, Bauchi, Adamawa, Taraba, Rivers and Ebonyi States, have reduced the number of out-of-school children from an estimated 13 million to 6.9 million.
Contrary to what the Minister said, there are other conflicting figures of the out of school children in the country obtained from other donor agencies.
The World Bank has revealed that Nigeria has the highest number of out of school children in the world with over 11 million pupils recorded in 2020.
That notwithstanding, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) recently said Nigeria has over 18.5 million children who are out of school, a figure that has risen since 2001, according to the UN agency.
Last year, UNICEF estimated that over 10.5 million children were out of school in Africa's most populous country.
But Rahama Farah, the head of UNICEF office in Kano told journalists recently that there are 18.5 million children out of school, 60% of whom (more than 10 million) are girls.
Although some donor agencies such as UNICEF, in partnership with the Nigerian government have been making efforts to reduce the number of children roaming the streets, the scourge of out of school children still remains a menace.
While government efforts to reduce the number of children roaming the street through the BESDA programme has shown a little improvement, LEADERSHIP investigation revealed that the numerous attacks on schools by criminal gangs in the north have particularly harmed children's education and worsened the situation.
As the challenge stares Nigeria in the face, mother's associations in some northern parts of the country, where the crisis is the worst hit, have stepped up efforts to fight and eradicate the ugly trend.
LEADERSHIP gathered that some mother's association in the northern part of the country, under the auspices of High Level Women Advocacy (HILWA) is contributing their widows' mite to return the children to school.
HiLWA is sensitising rural communities in northern states where out of school children are worst hit on the importance of girl-child education.
They are urging parents to allow their children, especially girls, to attend school where they can acquire knowledge and skills with which they can contribute to nation-building, while also contributing money from their personal pockets to ensure children get better education.
In some northern states, the High Level Women have presented bills to the state House of Assembly with the hope that once passed it will boost the enrollment of girls in schools.
HILWA, in Katsina State had gone extra miles to push for the passage of a law to ensure access to basic education for all children, including the girl-child.
The law spells out punishments for parents who withdraw their girl-child from schools for street hawking, among other offences, as well as teachers who aid and abet the offence under the law.
The bill on compulsory access to education had become law already, while HILWA has been making efforts to see that the second one also to do so.
Despite the efforts, lack of financial aid and insecurity in the affected region continue to hamper the progress.
Dwellers in the region have said the attacks are creating a precarious learning environment, discouraging parents and guardians from sending their children to school, thus making it difficult against the efforts to end the ugly trend.
Since Boko Haram abducted 200 schoolgirls in the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014, dozens of schools have been targeted for similar mass abductions.
Speaking with our correspondent, HiLWA secretary in Katsina, Maryam Abdullahi said the women advocate has been extended to thirteen northern states.
She said HiLWA was established when UNICEF found that it needs the backing of strong women in the states to help fight the number of out of school children.
Speaking on the method being adopted to achieve this target, she said the women in partnership with UNICEF train at least 300 teachers on a yearly basis. The training according to her focuses more on female ones.
"In our research we found out that where there are female teachers the girls come to school more than when there are male teachers.
'So that is why we are building these teachers capacity so that they now become responsible and take in the responsibility of becoming teachers so that we have more girls in schools and more girls that finish, complete and transit, that is the reason for training head teachers and as a result of that we now have an increased enrollment and retention after the training.
"We can now boast of more female teachers, we can boast of more female teachers who have gone back to acquire additional qualifications and majority of them have been elevated to principals of Secondary schools because of the training we rendered."
The Women Advocate noted that the training and retraining of teachers which accumulate a huge amount of money were done by their individual contributions and support from UNICEF.
"Now that UNICEF has disengaged we went soliciting for sustainability from the state government. We have all the assurances that it will be sustained.
"On the HiLWA part, if we quantified what we have been giving in terms of uniforms, writing materials, we have spent more than 10 Million towards that. Usually we go to the remote areas, buy materials, sew and distribute and we have done that several times," she said.
She further said it is engaging in a programme called G4G which is a component of the Girls' Education Project Phase 3 (GEP3) launched by UNICEF in 2017 and is being implemented in Northern Nigeria under collaboration with UNICEF Nigeria and the federal government with funding from UKAid.
The initiative seeks to empower girls with information and knowledge to help build their capacity to stand up for themselves, help put one million girls in school, support them to remain in school and improve their learning achievement.
Dr Binta Ado, who is HiLWA treasurer in Katsina said, "There is a G4G programme going on currently which was introduced by UNICEF and HiLWA is involved.
"The essence is to encourage transition. It started initially at the primary school because it was discovered that girls would not complete primary schools so that was how they started this programme and since then completion rate has increased. So UNICEF has now extended the programme at the Junior Secondary school level.
"Since we already have girls now completing primary school, the next thing is for them to transit to secondary school. So that is why we are starting the programme in junior secondary and HiLWA is highly involved. HiLWA members serve as monitors and believe me we have achieved a lot.
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"Many girls are completing school and those that had dropped out are coming back so this is one the areas that UNICEF and HiLWA are taking care of.
"We are now sensitising the women to accept this responsibility and serve as role models in this community," she added.
It is also gathered that HiLWA was established in 2014 in five pioneer states (Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Niger and Bauchi) but currently have extended to about thirteen states in the north.
"HiLWA will continue even after UNICEF has gone back or finished the programme because we have the backing of His Excellency who promised us that he will contribute even after UNICEF is gone and all the members of HiLWA are very passionate about education, especially girls' education," the HiLWA boss said.
A head teacher in Katsina, Hayatu Buhari told our correspondent that the efforts of HiLWA and the state government, including UNICEF and community efforts are yielding a significant increase, especially the number of girls.
"In the 2010/2011 academic session, our school had a total of 852 boys and 670 girls." However, this figure changed in the 2021/2022 session with girls surpassing boys with a figure of 1392 boys and 1490 girls," says Buhari, the head teacher of Abukur model primary school, Rimi Local government, katsina.
However, other residents lamented that the insecurity situation forced many schools to close, while some children got displaced with their parents, a situation that is threatening the success of most of the programmes.
Evidently, the project has expanded access to education for girls, resulting in about 300,000 school age girls having access to education and ensuring that they complete their education.
This story has been supported by Nigeria Health Watch through the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.
