A survey conducted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) indicates there’s been a marked rise of Nigerian children who are not attending school: from 10.5 million to 13.2 million – the highest in the world. Most of these children are in Nigeria’s northern states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, where violence and insecurity caused by the extremist group, Boko Haram, have disrupted academic activities.
It was muted sigh that greeted the October announcement by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) that the population of out-of-school children in Nigeria has increased from 10.5 million to 13.2 million – the country is ranked as having the highest number of out-of-school children in the world.
In April 2018, UBEC had pointed out that the previous statistics was not reliable and decided to audit the number – and rightly so because of the rising conflicts of Boko Haram and killer herdsmen.
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