Nigeria’s Out-Of-School Children Far Below 18 Million — Education Minister

Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, has challenged long-standing estimates placing the number of out-of-school children in the country at over 18 million, insisting that ongoing government verification exercises are revealing significantly lower figures.

The minister made the clarification on Tuesday during an appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today, while reacting to reports by UNESCO and UNICEF estimating that 18.3 million Nigerian children are currently out of school.

According to Alausa, the figure being cited by international organisations has remained unchanged for nearly a decade and does not accurately reflect current realities or the Federal Government’s interventions in the education sector.

“Talking about data, this UNESCO data, UNICEF data, 18.3 million, is the same number that has been quoted for 10 years. We do not need to challenge it, and I do not need to get into rhetoric,” he said.

The minister explained that the Federal Government has launched a nationwide mapping and verification exercise aimed at identifying the exact number and locations of out-of-school children across Nigeria.

He revealed that authorities are now geotagging affected children and documenting their addresses to obtain more precise, state-by-state statistics.

“What we are doing is data mapping of our out-of-school children as we continue aggressive interventions to move children back to school. Today, I can tell you that we have moved over one million children on the streets back to school in the last 30 months,” Alausa stated.

The minister further disclosed that the verification process has already been completed in several states, including Kaduna State, where the government discovered that the actual number of out-of-school children was considerably lower than previous estimates.

“UNICEF data says Kaduna has 1.8 million out-of-school children. We have completed the data mapping in Kaduna, and we found about 700,000 children who are out of school. Is that still high? Yes. But do we now have a more realistic number? Absolutely,” he explained.

Alausa maintained that the nationwide verification exercise would eventually prove that Nigeria’s total number of out-of-school children is far below the widely quoted 18.5 million figure.

“We are going to continue mapping all 36 states and then present our numbers. By the time we are done, we will have fewer than eight million out-of-school children,” he added.

A 2024 UNICEF report ranked Nigeria as the country with the highest number of out-of-school children globally, estimating that 10.2 million children of primary school age and 8.1 million children of junior secondary school age are currently not enrolled in school.

The report also stated that about 66 per cent of the affected children are concentrated in Nigeria’s North-West and North-East regions.

In 2024, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu described the out-of-school crisis as unacceptable and pledged to prioritise education, school reintegration, and skills development under his administration.