Nigeria’s education crisis runs deeper than any single policy failure. Behind the statistics of 18.3 million out-of-school children, a 75 percent learning poverty rate and decades of underfunding lies a more uncomfortable truth: the country has never fully decided what it believes education is for, or who deserves it.
On a Monday morning in June 2026, students at Government Day Secondary School in Lassa, Borno State, sat down to write their National Examinations Council papers. By mid-morning, gunmen had stormed the school, killed a teacher, a soldier and a local hunter, and marched 36 students into the bush at gunpoint. As of the time of this report, those children have not come home.
What happened in Lassa was extreme. What it represents is not. Across Nigeria, the act of sending a child to school has become, in too many communities, an act of faith rather than a routine of modern life. Whether the threat is a gun, a begging bowl, a leaking roof, an absent teacher or a family that simply cannot afford the uniform, the barriers between Nigerian children and a functioning education are many and they are old.
Nigeria holds the distinction, for the second consecutive decade, of having the largest population of out-of-school children in the world. Save the Children Nigeria estimates that 28 million children and adolescents currently lack access to formal schooling or digital learning opportunities. UNICEF’s figure stands at 18.3 million. The Federal Government’s own estimate, offered by the Minister of Education Dr Tunji Alausa at a basic education forum in Jos in April 2026, was 15 million, lower than both. Even at its most conservative, the number is a national emergency that has been declared, acknowledged, studied and insufficiently acted upon for years.
“Reliable data remains the backbone of effective education reform,” Alausa said at that forum. “Without knowing where the children are and why they are out of school, meaningful solutions cannot be implemented.” It was a candid admission, and an important one. Nigeria does not yet fully know where its missing children are.
What the classrooms that are open are actually teaching
The crisis does not begin and end with children who are entirely outside the school gate. For the millions who do attend, the quality of what happens inside the classroom has become its own emergency.
In July 2026, Alausa stated publicly that three out of every four Nigerian children are learning poor, meaning they cannot read and understand a simple age-appropriate text by the age of ten. The World Bank and UNICEF define learning poverty in exactly these terms, and Nigeria’s rate places it among the worst performing countries in the world by this measure, sitting close to the Sub-Saharan African regional average of 89 percent despite being the continent’s largest economy.
The examination results reflect this plainly. In 2025, only 38.32 percent of WAEC candidates obtained credit passes in five subjects including English Language and Mathematics, a figure that represented a fall of more than 33 percentage points from 72.12 percent in 2024. The National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools described it as the worst WAEC result in 15 years. The head of WAEC’s national office, Dr Amos Dangut, confirmed that of 1,969,313 candidates who sat the examination, only 754,545 crossed the minimum threshold.
These numbers do not emerge from nothing. They are produced by a system in which 21 percent of teachers have less than the minimum required training, according to education statistics compiled from UNESCO and World Bank sources. The early childhood education system has only 0.26 trained teachers per child. Primary school pupil-to-teacher ratios stood at 31 to one, and lower secondary at 28 to one, according to the most recent UIS-UNESCO data available. Children taught in overcrowded classrooms by undertrained teachers in schools without books are not failing examinations because they are not trying. They are failing because the system that should have prepared them never had the means or the will to do so.
The money that was never enough
Behind every classroom without a roof and every teacher without training is a budget allocation that was never sufficient.
The 2026 federal budget allocated N3.53 trillion to education, representing 6.1 percent of total government expenditure, a decline from 7.3 percent in 2025 under the same administration. UNESCO recommends that countries direct between 15 and 20 percent of their public expenditure to education. Nigeria has never met that benchmark under any administration, military or civilian, since independence.
Vice President Kashim Shettima, speaking at the 2025 Nigeria Education Forum in December, described the out-of-school children crisis as a national emergency and called for collaborative action across all tiers of government. He noted that federal education allocations had risen from N1.54 trillion in 2023 to N3.52 trillion in 2025, a real increase. But increases in raw figures without structural reform in how money is spent and who it reaches have repeatedly failed to translate into better outcomes at school level.
The gap between what is appropriated and what teachers actually experience is itself a crisis. Over 1,700 teachers in Federal Government Colleges went three years without their full salary entitlements, a debt carried into 2025 that sparked confrontations between the government and academic unions. In Lagos State, the Academic Staff Union of Universities announced in July 2026 that it would picket and shut down Lagos State University, Lagos State University of Science and Technology and Lagos State University of Education if the state government did not implement the FGN-ASUU 2025 Agreement, describing six months of engagement with the government as having produced no concrete results. The union’s Lagos Zonal Chairman, Professor Adesola Nassir, put it plainly: a state that describes itself as the Centre of Excellence cannot credibly sustain that identity while the academic workforce responsible for producing that excellence remains in prolonged uncertainty over agreed welfare commitments.
ASUU strikes have cost Nigerian university students an estimated five full academic years in total disruption since 1999. Each strike compounds a deficit that students spend the rest of their careers trying to recover.
Two systems, one unresolved tension
To understand the scale of Nigeria’s out-of-school crisis, particularly in the north, it is necessary to understand that the country has never operated a single unified education system. It has operated two, and the tension between them has never been resolved.
The Western formal school system, structured around the national curriculum and examined by WAEC and NECO, runs alongside a centuries-old Islamic educational tradition that preceded colonialism in Northern Nigeria by several hundred years. At its height, the great Islamic centres of learning in Kano, Sokoto and beyond produced scholars of theology, philosophy and governance at a time when their formal educational infrastructure rivalled anything on the continent. The Almajiri system, through which boys were sent to study under Islamic scholars, was once structured, community-supported and intellectually serious.
What it has become is a different matter. A 2025 peer-reviewed public health study published in the journal Conflict and Health described the Almajiri system as having devolved from a revered educational tradition into a complex humanitarian crisis, now associated with street begging, child neglect and social exclusion. The study, authored by Saifullahi Idris Umar and Sadiq Muhammad Maaji, noted that without urgent and sustained intervention, the system will remain a major barrier to national development.
Former President Goodluck Jonathan attempted to bridge the two systems through the Almajiri Model Schools programme, building hundreds of integrated schools designed to teach both Quranic and formal education. Research published in the Sapientia Foundation Journal of Education, Sciences and Gender Studies found that the programme was rejected by the very beneficiary stakeholders it was designed to serve, including parents, mallams and children themselves, with millions remaining on the streets of northern cities, particularly in the North East. Religious and cultural resistance to the inclusion of secular content in Islamic education remains the principal obstacle. Many communities in Northern Nigeria regard the Almajiri tradition as a sacred custom and view any integration of formal education as a threat to religious purity.
The path forward is not without precedent. Indonesia transformed its traditional pesantren Islamic boarding school system into a framework that now effectively integrates Islamic and secular education under national quality standards. Malaysia did the same with its madrasah system. Morocco, following the Casablanca bombings of 2003, reformed its msids tradition into a dual education structure where Islamic schools operate alongside modern secular education. Each of these countries made the same fundamental decision: that religious tradition and foundational literacy are not incompatible, and that the state has a responsibility to ensure both. Nigeria has been attempting variations of this since the 1970s. The difference is that those countries followed through.
Insecurity as education policy failure
The attack in Lassa was not an isolated event. It was part of a sustained pattern of violence against schools in Northern Nigeria that has effectively functioned as an education policy in reverse, un-enrolling children faster than any government programme can enrol them.
Multiple schools across Kwara, Plateau, Niger and Nasarawa States were forced to suspend operations between November 2025 and mid-2026 following armed attacks and community insecurity. The Borno State Government ordered the closure of schools in Lassa, Dille and Chul communities immediately following the June 2026 attack. In Oriire Local Government Area in Oyo State, armed men invaded communities in May 2026, killed a teacher and abducted over 40 pupils and teachers including the principal of Community High School, Ahoro-Esinele.
“Since yesterday we cannot sleep,” Emmanuel Dari, whose 16-year-old daughter Lucy Emmanuel was among those taken in Lassa, told journalists. His daughter was sitting in her classroom when the gunmen came.
When a school becomes a target, the rational response of a family is to keep children home. When enough families make that rational response, enrollment collapses and communities fall behind educationally for a generation. Insecurity is not a side issue to Nigeria’s education crisis. It is one of its primary drivers, and it has never received the sustained, coordinated policy response that its scale demands.
The teachers who leave and do not come back
A functioning school system requires teachers who are present, qualified and motivated. Nigeria’s system produces many graduates who become qualified teachers and then promptly leave, either for better-paying private sector work, for emigration to the United Kingdom, Canada or other African countries, or for other public sector roles that pay more reliably.
The country’s education system is described consistently by education analysts as bogged down by poor funding, industrial crises, brain drain, poor remuneration, decayed infrastructure and a shortage of competent teachers, challenges that cut through primary, secondary and tertiary education without distinction.
Katsina State offered a credible counter-example in 2026. Governor Dikko Radda distributed appointment letters to 2,158 newly recruited teachers in July, bringing the total hired under his administration to 9,000 since 2023, described by the State Commissioner for Basic and Secondary Education, Yusuf Jibia, as the highest teacher recruitment exercise in the state’s history. More significantly, out of 64,598 applicants, candidates went through computer-based testing and oral interviews before the final selection. Jibia stated that no public office holder interfered in the process and that deployment was based on the actual staffing needs of individual schools and subject requirements. It was a model of transparent, merit-driven recruitment in a sector where political interference in hiring has historically been the norm.
The model is replicable. Whether the political will to replicate it exists elsewhere is a different question.
The digital wall
In a world where digital literacy has become a basic prerequisite for economic participation, the widening gap between Nigerian students with technology access and those without is adding a new dimension to an old crisis.
Save the Children Nigeria identified a rapidly widening digital divide as one of the central challenges facing Nigerian education as of January 2026, sitting alongside insecurity, learning poverty, teacher shortages and low retention rates. In the same year, Nigeria failed to send students to the International STEM and Mathematics Olympiads due to a lack of funding, according to education advocate Alex Onyia, whose account was cited by former Anambra Governor Peter Obi in a post on X in July 2026. A country of over 220 million people, with one of the largest youth populations in the world, could not fund the participation of a handful of its most gifted students in a global academic competition.
The Federal Government has begun expanding the Digital National Education Management Information System and rolling out the Learner Identification Number to enable real-time tracking of learners nationwide. These are steps in the right direction. They are also, against the scale of the problem, still small steps.
The path forward
The solutions to Nigeria’s education crisis are not secrets. They have been named, costed and documented in research papers, government policy documents and development organisation reports for the better part of three decades. What has been missing is not knowledge but consistency of commitment.
Funding must reach the UNESCO benchmark in practice and not just in political speeches. States that currently subsidise WAEC and NECO examination fees for public school candidates, and who faced an 82 percent fee increase proposed and then suspended by the Federal Government in July 2026 following public outcry, understand instinctively that financial barriers to examination access push vulnerable students out of the system. That understanding must be reflected in how budgets are built and protected.
Teacher welfare cannot continue to be the first casualty of fiscal pressure. The states and institutions that have successfully improved learning outcomes over sustained periods share a common feature: they treated teacher welfare not as a reward for good performance but as a precondition for it.
The dual education system requires a framework of genuine integration, one that does not treat Islamic education as a problem to be eliminated but as a tradition to be brought into productive relationship with the formal system. The international examples that have worked share one characteristic: they respected the tradition while insisting on minimum standards of foundational literacy for every child.
Security in and around schools must be understood as an education issue as well as a defence issue. Every child kidnapped from a classroom represents a compounding of losses, for the child, for the family, for the school community and for the country’s human capital base.
In December 2025, Vice President Shettima said no Nigerian should be denied tertiary education due to financial constraints. In April 2026, the education minister said the out-of-school crisis was a problem the government was fixing. In July 2026, ASUU threatened to shut down Lagos universities over unpaid welfare agreements. In the same month, 36 children remained in captivity after being taken from an examination hall.
These things are all true simultaneously. And that simultaneity, of stated commitment and lived reality pulling in opposite directions, is the defining condition of Nigerian education in 2026.
A country is ultimately judged not by what it says it values but by what it chooses to protect when resources are scarce and choices are hard. For decades, Nigeria has chosen, through budget lines and policy neglect and unreformed systems, to protect almost everything except the classroom. The children bearing the cost of that choice did not make it. They are simply the ones living with it.
