The Federal Government has said it successfully returned more than one million street children to school within the last 30 months as part of ongoing efforts to tackle Nigeria’s out-of-school children crisis.
The Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, disclosed this on Tuesday during an appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today, where he addressed concerns over the country’s alarming number of out-of-school children.
Alausa said the intervention forms part of broader reforms aimed at improving access to basic education and addressing long-standing structural challenges in the sector.
He, however, questioned the accuracy of widely cited figures by international organisations, which estimate that about 18.3 million Nigerian children are currently out of school.
According to the minister, the figure—often attributed to UNESCO and UNICEF—has remained unchanged for nearly a decade and does not reflect recent government interventions.
He said, “The 18.3 million figure has been quoted for about 10 years. Rather than engage in rhetoric, what we are doing is aggressive data mapping while implementing interventions to get children back into classrooms.
“Today, I can confirm that over one million children who were previously on the streets have been reintegrated into schools in the last 30 months.”
The minister further revealed that the Federal Government had commenced a nationwide geotagging exercise to accurately identify and document out-of-school children across states.
He explained that the initiative involves locating affected children through verifiable addresses, thereby providing more reliable and actionable data.
Alausa cited Kaduna State as a case study, noting that while previous estimates suggested about 1.8 million out-of-school children in the state, the government’s mapping exercise identified approximately 700,000.
“Is the figure still high? Yes. But do we now have a more realistic number? Absolutely,” he said.
The minister added that the ongoing exercise, which has already covered between seven and eight states, would eventually extend to all 36 states of the federation.
He expressed optimism that the final verified figure of out-of-school children in Nigeria would be significantly lower than current global estimates.
“By the time we complete the nationwide mapping, Nigeria will have fewer than eight million out-of-school children,” he stated.
A 2024 report by UNICEF had ranked Nigeria as the country with the highest number of out-of-school children globally, with 10.2 million at the primary level and 8.1 million at the junior secondary level.
The report also indicated that about 66 per cent of the affected children are concentrated in the North-West and North-East regions.
Meanwhile, President Bola Tinubu had earlier described the situation as unacceptable, pledging to prioritise education through policies focused on school reintegration and skills development.
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