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‘Why out-of-school children increased by eight million in North West’

By Abdulganiyu Alabi, Kaduna
09 September 2022   |   4:05 am
National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) has linked the increase in out-of-school children from 10.5 million in 2021 to 18.5 million in 2022 to banditry, kidnapping, insurgency and early marriage in the North West.

[FILES] Out-of-school children . (Photo by ISSOUF SANOGO / AFP)

National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) has linked the increase in out-of-school children from 10.5 million in 2021 to 18.5 million in 2022 to banditry, kidnapping, insurgency and early marriage in the North West.

Disclosing this, yesterday, the Executive Secretary (ES), Prof. Bashir Usman, stated that the alarming rate of out-of-school children might worsen the security situation in the region and the country at large, if not checked.

Usman was speaking at a Capacity Building Training for members of School-Based Management Committees (SBMCs) and Mothers Association (MA) from North West states on combating the menace of out-of-school children.

He noted that 3.5 million of the 18.5 million children have nomadic background.

Represented at the event by the Commission’s Director of Quality Assurance, Mr. Akin Akinyosoye, the ES said the issue had been one of the major challenges in the implementation of the Nomadic Education Programme (NEP) in Nigeria.

He said: “In this 2022, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that Nigeria has 18.5 million children that are out of school. This figure is quite high when compared with 2021 estimates put at 10.5 million, which puts Africa’s most populous country’s out-of-school on an emergency frequency. Alarmingly, UNICEF posits that 60
per cent of the 18.5 million in Nigeria are girls.”

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