The distance between what Nigeria has promised its children and what it has delivered is not fate. It is a choice that gets made again every year, in every budget, in every enforcement gap, in every election where child welfare does not make the list of things worth fighting for.
Nigeria celebrates its children today. It has also decided, year after year, budget after budget, that they are worth exactly that fraction of their potential.
She is seven years old and has never been to school. Not because she refused. Not because her parents did not want it for her. But because the nearest school is eight kilometres away, the road turns to mud in the rainy season, and the school itself, when she and her family have made the trip, has had no teacher for most of the last year.
She lives in rural Zamfara. She is Nigerian. She is promised a free and compulsory education by her leaders, which she never had.
This is not a story about one unlucky girl. It is a story about a state that knows exactly what it owes and has chosen, year after year, budget after budget, to owe it still.
Nigeria is celebrating children it has not yet decided to fund.
A Country of Children
Nigeria is, by population, a country of children. Almost half of the people alive here, 98 million of them, are under 18. The median age is 18. Not 35, not 40. Eighteen. When we talk about Nigeria’s present, we are already talking about children. They are not waiting in the wings. They are the stage.
Schooled, But Not Taught
The Universal Basic Education Act, the law that guarantees every Nigerian child free, compulsory schooling, was signed in 2004. That law is old enough to have finished secondary school by now. And this morning, 10.2 million children woke up with nowhere to go.
Most of them are not dropouts. That word implies they were once in. Many were not. A girl from a displaced community in Borno who has never sat in a classroom is not a dropout; she is someone the education system has never reached. A boy whose family cannot quietly afford the ‘voluntary’ levies at the local government school is not a dropout either. He is someone the system made unwelcome and then counted as absent.
And for those who do make it through the door, who show up, sit down, stay, the returns are heartbreaking. Roughly one in four children aged seven to fourteen can read with any real comprehension. One in four. Which means three out of four are sitting in classrooms, being counted, and not being taught. A child who goes through years of school and emerges unable to read a sentence has not been educated. She has been administered.
A conversation about Nigeria’s future that begins after the children are out of it begins too late.
Credit Where It is Due
Something must be said plainly before anything else: progress has happened, and it deserves to be named.
Wild poliovirus, the disease that robbed generations of their legs, their futures, their ordinary lives, is gone. Eliminated, and efforts are being made to constrain the Poliovirus type 2 strain and significant progress are being made. That happened here, in this country, which was once one of the last three on earth where the virus was still circulating. Fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday. More are being born in the presence of someone trained to help. These did not happen by accident. Real people did real work in difficult places to make these happen.
One in two girls in rural Nigeria is married before she turns eighteen. That figure has lived in reports and briefs for years now, long enough that it has almost lost its capacity to shock. But try to hold it as a single life, not a statistic. A girl, perhaps fifteen, perhaps fourteen, pulled from whatever future she was beginning to imagine, handed to a household that was not hers, and told that this is what growing up looks like. Across the country, over 23 million women alive today went through some version of this experience.
But progress, when you sit with it long enough, raises an uncomfortable question: If the system was capable of this, what is its excuse for everything else? The 2.2 million children who have never received a single vaccine are not hidden. Nobody lost them. They are in communities that the state has simply not yet decided are worth the trip.
What changed was not the children. What changed was the system’s will around them and will can be switched back on.
What This Country Has Asked of Its Daughters
Talk to any woman who grew up in a rural community in northern Nigeria, and she will not describe her childhood as a list of deprivations. She will describe it as normal, because it was. That is part of what makes this so difficult to sit with.
One in two girls in rural Nigeria is married before she turns eighteen. That figure has lived in reports and briefs for years now, long enough that it has almost lost its capacity to shock. But try to hold it as a single life, not a statistic. A girl, perhaps fifteen, perhaps fourteen, pulled from whatever future she was beginning to imagine, handed to a household that was not hers, and told that this is what growing up looks like. Across the country, over 23 million women alive today went through some version of this experience.
Every state has a law against it. Every state has signed on to some version of the Child Rights Act, which sets 18 as the minimum age. The law is not the problem. The problem is that the law has never been given the teeth to travel into the communities where it is needed, into the conversations where it is absent, into the registries where ages get quietly adjusted, and nobody asks too many questions.
The gap between law and enforcement is not a technicality. It is where childhood disappears.
Read the Numbers, Not the Speech
Politicians in this country are generous with children in their speeches. Children are the future, children are our hope, children are what we are building for. You will hear it today, on Children’s Day, in the kind of language that sounds warm in a hall and means nothing in a budget line.
So skip the speech. Read the numbers.
The 2025 federal budget allocates about 11.51 per cent of total spending to education, health, and social protection combined, the sectors that most directly determine whether a Nigerian child survives, learns, and has any protection when things go wrong. All the sectors. Together. Eleven point five one per cent.
UNESCO recommends that education should receive 15-20 per cent of the national budget. The African Union’s Abuja Declaration calls for 15 per cent to be allocated solely to health. Nigeria has not hit either target individually. What it has done is to add both sectors together, plus social protection, and call the combined figure adequate.
There is a World Bank measure called the Human Capital Index. It calculates, country by country, what fraction of a child’s potential she is likely to reach, given the health and education systems she is born into.
Today, somewhere in Nigeria, a child is sitting under a tree because her school has no roof. Another is in a clinic that has no drugs. Another has no clinic at all. Another was married last month and will not finish secondary school. They are not abstractions. They are not future problems. They are present ones, and the state already has on the books the laws, frameworks, and international commitments that say they should not be.
A child born in Nigeria today scores 0.36. Thirty-six per cent. Nearly two-thirds of what she could become were erased before she had learnt to walk.
That shortfall is not a calculation problem. It is a priority problem.
What Is Actually Being Asked
Nobody is being asked to do anything new. That is worth saying clearly, because reform conversations in Nigeria have a habit of arriving with a sense of impossibility that the facts do not support.
The 2.2 million unvaccinated children need to be reached, not in a decade, but in two years. The health workers exist. The cold chains exist. The protocols have been written and rewritten. What has not consistently existed is the political will to protect the funding and send the teams to the last, hardest kilometre. Polio vaccination coverage tripled in this country once. The only question is whether someone in authority cares enough to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The Child Rights Act needs enforcement that actually finds children, not enforcement on paper, not enforcement at press conferences, but enforcement in the communities where birth certificates are never issued, where girls are married off in arrangements that predate any registry, where children work instead of learning, because nobody comes to check. The law cannot enforce itself. It needs people and budgets behind it.
And the budget needs a floor; it cannot fall through. Twenty per cent, combined, for education, health, and social protection, ringfenced, protected, and non-negotiable even in lean years. Especially in lean years. Children do not pause their need to eat and learn because oil revenues have dipped.
A Choice, Not a Fate
We are not here to ask anyone to feel bad. Guilt is not a policy. Sympathy does not build schools, train health workers, or register births. What we are asking for is something much simpler and much harder: consistency between what this country says about its children and what it actually does for them.
Today, somewhere in Nigeria, a child is sitting under a tree because her school has no roof. Another is in a clinic that has no drugs. Another has no clinic at all. Another was married last month and will not finish secondary school. They are not abstractions. They are not future problems. They are present ones, and the state already has on the books the laws, frameworks, and international commitments that say they should not be.
The distance between what Nigeria has promised its children and what it has delivered is not fate. It is a choice that gets made again every year, in every budget, in every enforcement gap, in every election where child welfare does not make the list of things worth fighting for.
Nigerian children are not waiting to lead. They are already nearly half this country, living in the present, not the future. The question is whether Nigeria will finally decide to meet them there.
Rasaq Kareem and Ozoemena Blessing write for the Centre for Inclusive Social Development (CISD Nigeria). CISD is a civic organisation dedicated to inclusive governance and social accountability. cisdnigeria.org
