Local actors are finding new ways through Nigeria’s education sector challenges.
In 2017 while working as a fixer for Regency Foundation on a documentary about the Centre for Girls Education, I saw Amina. She was standing beside the walls of a classroom in Tudun Wada Zaria, listening to and repeating the words from the voices of other children inside a class.
One…Two…Three…Four…she counted along with the children in the class. Then at ten, she picked up a tray from the floor filled with cooked groundnuts, put the tray on her head, and walked slowly away from the school premises. Amina is one of over five hundred thousand out-of-school children, in just Kaduna state alone.
Every child is expected to go to school. But for a developing country of over 200 million citizens, it is clear that the school facilities are not enough. In Nigeria, like Amina, the children left behind from learning opportunities are mostly from rural areas that are hard to reach. They work to support their families as they come from very poor households. They are mostly girls and are equally the most vulnerable in the world.
While many of the problems in Nigeria often seem louder and take more importance in the national spotlight, endemic corruption in Nigeria’s education system does equally insidious damage to the country as well. At the most fundamental, corruption…