The number of out-of-school children in Nigeria has risen to 20 million despite the government’s decision to spend N1bn ($2.3m) on feeding school pupils on a daily basis, according to new research by UNESCO.
Nigeria’s ministry of education has pushed back against the figures from the UN’s education organisation.
In 2016, the Muhammadu Buhari administration introduced the school feeding programme to boost enrolment.
The Nigerian government said, in February this year, that it feeds about 10 million students daily through its National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme. Months earlier, the education minister, Adamu Adamu, also claimed that the number of out-of-school children had dropped from 10 million to six million.
However, the latest global data from UNESCO on out-of-school children says Africa’s largest economy now has 20 million out-of-school children.
According to the most recent global data on out-of-school children from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Nigeria today has approximately 20 million out-of-school children (UNESCO).
According to UNESCO, there are “244 million children and youth between the ages of 6 and 18 worldwide (who) are still out of school,” using “new and enhanced methodology.”
According to data, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan have the greatest percentages of out-of-school children in the world.
For more than a decade, Nigeria’s population has fluctuated between 10.5 million and roughly 15 million, with the situation deteriorating due to the country’s deteriorating security condition.
UNESCO announced the figures in a statement issued on Thursday by Dafalia Dimitra, a media specialist, with the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM), which is developed by an independent team and published by UNESCO.
The global organisation said the team developing the report “has the official mandate of monitoring progress in meeting the Sustainable Development Goal on education, SDG 4.”
The statement read in part: “The new estimates, published online by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, show that sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the most children and youth out of school with 98 million children and young people excluded from education. It is also the only region where this number is increasing; out-of-school rates are falling more slowly than the rate at which the school-age population is growing.
“The region with the second highest out-of-school population is Central and Southern Asia with 85 million. The top three countries with the most children and youth excluded from education are India, Nigeria and Pakistan.”
According to the Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Silvia Montoya, efficient use of the available data is important to address the gaps towards achieving the fourth goal of the SDGs.
“UNESCO has long underscored the need to make more efficient use of the data we have. That’s why we’ve brought together administrative data with information from surveys and censuses. By using multiple data sources, gaps are filled, data trends are smoothed, and we can draw consistent time series,” the official said.
