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Economic and socio-cultural factors keep nearly 40 percent of Nigerian children aged between six and 14 out of school

For a developing nation like Nigeria, the statistics of out of school children, OOSC, are not impressive. Out of the country’s 35.6 million children aged between six and fourteen, 10.1 million were not in school as at 2008.

This was the highlight of a draft report of a study on OOSC jointly anchored by the United Nations International Children Emergency Fund, UNICEF, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, United Nations Institute of Statistics, UIS, and the Federal Ministry of Education for the Universal Basic Education Commission, UBEC. It was presented to the stakeholders on July 18, 2011.

The document paints the grim picture in proper perspective. While 12,531,414 boys and 12,130,673 girls aged six to 11 ought to be in primary schools, 3,366,138, about 26.9 percent and 3,932,679 or 32.4 percent of the boys and girls respectively were not in school. This meant that of 24,662,087 children, 7,298,817 were not receiving formal education in the country three years ago. Also, 200,630 and 168,795 of the total boys and girls respectively dropped out of school.  

The world body noted further that as at that date, out of 10,912,131 boys and girls aged 12 to 14 who ought to be in junior secondary schools, JSS, 2,834,903 were not. A total of 625,993 dropped out of school. A breakdown of these figures showed that 5,543,223 boys were supposed to be in junior schools. About 1,308,779 were not while 324,576 dropped out. Of 5,368,908 girls, 1,526,124 were not in school while 301,417 had dropped out.

Drop-out rate was higher in junior secondary schools than in the primary school category. A substantial portion of out of school children came from the extreme poor families and rural dwellers, thus making it more of poverty and rural phenomenon. The report noted that the problem of out of school children in both primary and junior secondary schools was more severe in all states of the three geo-political zones in the north than in the south. The factors that kept the children out of schools were grouped into economic, socio-cultural and supply side barriers and bottlenecks. Government and political influence, especially in the capacity of government to implement education policies as well as politicisation of basic education equally affected the magnitude of the problem.

To arrest the scourge, the report said government should scale up existing conditional cash transfer to alleviate poverty in families linked to their enrolling children in schools; revive the school feeding programme or institute commodity voucher scheme for extremely poor families as well as enhance tax relief for low income earners.

In addition, the document asked the stakeholders to strengthen the National Health Insurance Scheme and Community Based Health Insurance Scheme. It called for special focus on rural schools while girl education programme should be scaled up. Similar boy’s education projects should be established while adoption of child–friendly school initiatives must be undertaken.

When the report was presented on July 18 to stakeholders from government ministries, departments and agencies recommended that the UBEC management should adopt it as a vital and useful document in planning for basic education delivery, especially on OOSC in Nigeria and that the commission should undertake further studies to determine the true situation of out of school children in states and regions with very high incidences and also to determine possible causes to arrest the trend.

UBEC was asked to urge states with very high scourge of OOSC to step up programmes and activities that would stem the tide while the commission should create greater awareness by exposing states to analytical reports of this nature.