The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) lamented that there are about 1.5 million children estimated to be out of school across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states respectively.
The UN agency urged the critical stakeholders to scale up funding in education sectors, which it described as an education emergency crisis in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States.
UNICEF Education Manager, who is also the Officer-in-Charge, Chief of Borno Field Office, Mr Gilmar Teddy Zambrana Cruz disclosed this during a two-day UNICEF GPE-AF project on Education and Learning for Children in Emergencies in North-East Nigeria held in Maiduguri, on Wednesday.
He noted that education should be given priority and urged the state government in the three most affected by the insurgency to ensure children not only have access to learning centres but must be safe and secure for learning.
“We have a learning crisis in the northeast of Nigeria, we estimate around two million out-of-school children, especially in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States respectively. We are working together with the state government and ministries to address these challenges, we are helping the government to implement the programs that would help the children come back to school but also to help them address the delays they may have in learning.
“We expect that this programme will change the education conditions of children, we have done that in the past, we have similar experience and we change the education conditions of 180, 000 children in the BAY states”, he urged.
Also speaking, Borno State Universal Basic Education Board Prof Bulama Kagu noted,” Yes we are challenged as regards to out of school children. We are just recovering from the insurgency. Not all the local governments are liberated from the chuckle of Boko Haram when you talk about Abadam, Guzamala and Kala-Balge local government areas still have challenges of insecurity.
“I can assure you that by the time we succeed in liberating these communities and we resettle them in no distance you are going to see things changing.”
The Adamawa State Commissioner for Education and Human Capital, Dr Umaru Garba Tella explained that the out-of-school children menace is a national burden and called on the sub-region governors to treat it with utmost importance.
“It is alarming and it is a sense, that no nation will progress at a high rate of this menace, the best place for a child is the classroom. I don’t put in place deliberate policies and actions to take these children off the streets, I doubt if we are going to be productive as a society, we must work together to address this lingering issue as a sub-region.”
According to UNICEF, the project is funded by the Global Partnership for Education – Accelerated Fund (GPE-AF) and it will build on the gains of the previous GPE-AF that occurred from 2020-2023 and was implemented in 24 LGAs across the BAY states. During the previous project, UNIthe CEF, governments and partners improved formal and non-formal education access, learning outcomes and continuity of learning for more than 180,000 conflict-affected children.
