How Poverty Is Forcing Millions of Nigerian Children Out of School

In the Lugbe area of Abuja, a 30-year-old mother named Hadiza Shuaibu sells “kunun aya”, a local tiger nut drink, while her husband works as a carpenter nearby. Together, they earn just enough to survive in a one-room apartment. Not enough, though, to put their two children in school.

“My children, Aisha and Abdullahi, are five and eight years old,” Shuaibu told The ICIR in a documented report on education and poverty in the FCT. “Due to lack of money, they do not go to school.”

Aisha and Abdullahi are not alone. Not by a long distance.

Nigeria Tops a Record No Nation Should Want

According to a 2024 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Nigeria has approximately 18.3 million out-of-school children, comprising 10.2 million of primary school age and 8.1 million of secondary school age. This figure positions Nigeria as the country with one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children globally.

To understand the scale of that failure, consider this: Nigeria’s 18.3 million out-of-school children account for nearly 15 per cent of the entire global out-of-school population, according to UNICEF data published in 2024.

The numbers have been rising for more than a decade, climbing from roughly 10.5 million in 2013 to 18.3 million in 2024, despite repeated government-backed interventions aimed at reversing the trend.

Poverty sits at the centre of this crisis. According to the National Multi-Dimensional Poverty Report released by the Federal Government in 2022, in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics, UNDP, UNICEF, and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 133 million out of Nigeria’s over 200 million people live in different poverty categories, representing 63 per cent of the total population. The report further states that two-thirds of children aged 0 to 17 are multi-dimensionally poor, and half of all poor people in Nigeria are children.

Those two facts, placed side by side, tell a story that budget papers and policy documents rarely admit out loud; when a family cannot feed itself, the schoolbag is the first thing left behind.

During a regional stakeholders engagement meeting in Gombe, Dr Tushar Rane, UNICEF’s Chief of Bauchi Field Office, said plainly, “Unfortunately, this positions Nigeria with the challenge of having the largest number of out-of-school children globally.”

When “Free Education” Comes With a Price Tag Too High to Pay

The gap between government policy and lived reality in Nigeria’s education system is wide enough to swallow childhoods whole.

Even though primary education is officially free and compulsory under Nigerian law, about 10.5 million children aged five to fourteen are not in school, according to UNICEF’s Nigeria country data. Only 61 per cent of children aged six to eleven regularly attend primary school.

The hidden costs of schooling, uniforms, textbooks, sandals, and daily transport price out families who cannot absorb even small expenses. As reported by development aid researchers and field journalists, parents in low-income households regularly cite these indirect costs as the decisive reason their children stop attending.

Ten-year-old Joshua from Lagos was forced to drop out of primary school when his parents could no longer afford fees, books, and uniforms. He currently has no path back to the classroom and instead works as a house help at weekends and as a street hawker during the week, as documented in a 2024 report by DevelopmentAid.

Similarly, Terka, a 13-year-old from Benue State, had his education disrupted when his village was attacked by armed herdsmen. Forced to flee with his family, he now lives in an internally displaced persons camp where formal education is scarce, according to the same report.

In Niger State, the pattern repeats on a massive scale. As reported by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in 2024, 42.8 per cent of children in Niger State are out of school, the highest rate in the entire north-central region. Many of these children are now street hawkers, selling water sachets, groundnuts, bread, and roasted corn across markets and motor parks.

Nafisa Umar is among them. As documented by IWPR, Nafisa sells snacks on the streets of Minna and describes daily verbal abuse and customers who refuse to pay. “The major danger of street hawking is abuse and insults, particularly from young men,” she said. “Some of them refuse to pay their debts when I ask; they insult me or even throw money at me.”

According to the NBS data cited in a 2025 legislative brief by the Nigerian Institute of Legislative and Democratic Studies, Kebbi State and Sokoto State record the worst school attendance figures in Nigeria, with out-of-school rates of 67.6 per cent and 66.4 per cent, respectively, in some local government areas.

In the northeast, the crisis compounds further. According to UNICEF Nigeria, 2 million children in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states are currently out of school. In those three states, 56 per cent of displaced children do not attend school, and only 29 per cent of schools have teachers who meet minimum qualification standards.

Israel Chukwuma, headteacher of Ab Tech International School in Chanchaga, Niger State, has watched the dropout pattern from his classroom window. “The effects of school dropout are enormous, ranging from illiteracy, criminality, and poverty to a huge burden on society in the long run,” he told IWPR.

A Budget That Does Not Match the Rhetoric

The federal government’s investment in education tells its own story, and it is not a flattering one.

Nigeria’s 2025 Appropriation Bill, presented by President Bola Tinubu to the National Assembly in December 2024, allocates N3.52 trillion to education out of a total budget of N49.70 trillion, representing 7.3 per cent of total spending. This allocation falls significantly below UNESCO’s recommended benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent of the national budget, as reported by BusinessDay.

As reported by BusinessDay, the long-term trend is stark. In 2015, education accounted for 10.75 per cent of Nigeria’s national budget. By 2025, that share had slid to approximately 5.47 per cent.

The money that does get allocated rarely reaches the children who need it most. According to BusinessDay’s analysis, personnel costs swallowed more than 65 per cent of the 2024 education budget, leaving just 30 per cent for capital projects such as new classrooms, laboratories, and digital learning infrastructure.

Nubi Achebo, Director of Academic Planning at the Nigerian University of Technology and Management, put the implementation gap in plain terms. “Funds often arrive late or are not fully utilised. For example, the N300 billion university revitalisation money budgeted in 2023 had still not been released by 2025,” he said.

Friday Erhabor, Director of Media and Strategies at Marklenez Limited, went further. “Even at 7.3 per cent, by the time provisions are made for leakages in our budget implementation, you will realise that the actual money deployed will be less than five per cent. A country with such a reality will never escape from the scourge of out-of-school children, low development, insecurity and poverty,” he said.

Tunde Adeoye, a Lagos-based development economist quoted by BusinessDay, put the ideological failure into one sentence. “The budget tells you where a country’s heart is,” he said. “And Nigeria’s heart is clearly not in education.”

The Federal Ministry of Education did not respond to requests for comment from The Gazette News on specific plans to address the poverty-driven school dropout crisis as of press time.

A Generation Already Paying the Price

The consequences of mass school dropout are not abstract. They are already showing up in literacy statistics, labour market data, and on the streets of every major Nigerian city.

According to a 2024 UNICEF report, only 26 per cent of Nigerian children and adolescents aged seven to fourteen possess basic reading and mathematics skills. As reported by DevelopmentAid, this literacy gap perpetuates poverty and limits access to better life opportunities, trapping generations in cycles of deprivation.

As further reported by DevelopmentAid, low literacy rates exacerbate insecurity and instability, since unemployed and illiterate youth are more likely to be recruited by extremist groups, and areas with greater rates of illiteracy tend to experience more violence.

Busayo Aderounmu, a senior lecturer at Covenant University, Ota, told BusinessDay that bigger budgets without accountability still fail the children. “An increase in funding without appropriate management and utilisation leads to mismanagement of the allocated funds, which invariably will not lead to development in the sector,” she said. “Besides, an increase in budgetary allocation without improving the welfare of teachers and lecturers as well as providing an enabling teaching environment and infrastructure will not improve the quality of education in the country.”

The Ministry of Education has announced a 2024 to 2027 roadmap targeting the reintegration of 15 million out-of-school children into classrooms. Whether it reaches Aisha in Lugbe or Nafisa in Minna remains, for now, an open question.

As one education scholar said at this year’s Children’s Day commemoration, “Until the child of a minister sits beside the child of a market woman in the same public school, equity in education will remain a myth.”

Nigeria has not proved him wrong yet.