UNICEF says education emergency crisis bedevils Borno, Yobe, Adamawa

…As out-of-school children in 3 states hit 1.5m

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has urged the critical stakeholders to scale up funding in education sectors, which it described, as education emergency crisis in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States.

The UN Agency lamented that there were about 1.5 million children estimated to be out of school across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States, respectively.

Gilmar Teddy Zambrana Cruz, UNICEF Education Manager, who doubles as Officer-in-Charge, Chief of Borno Field Office, stated this during a two-day “UNICEF GPE-AF Project on Education and Learning for Children in Emergencies in North-East Nigeria”, held in Maiduguri.

He noted that education should be given priority, urging the Government of three most-affected States by insurgency to ensure children not only have access to learning centres, but must also be safe and secure for learning.

“We have learning crisis in the Northeast of Nigeria, we estimate around two million out of school children especially in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States respectively.

“We are working together with State Government and Ministries to address this challenges, we are helping the Government to implement the programme that would help the children to come back to schools but also to help them address the delay they might have in learning.

“We expect that this programme will change the education conditions of children, we have done that in the past we have similar experience and we change the education conditions of 180, 000 children in the BAY (Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States”, he said.

Also speaking, Bulama Kagu, Professor and Chairman, Borno State Universal Basic Education Board, noted that,” Yes we are challenges as regards to out of school children.

“We are just recovering from insurgency not all the local government are liberated from the chakle of Boko Haram when you talk about Abadam, Guzamala and Kala-Balge local government areas still have challenges of insecurity.

“I can assure you that by the time we succeeding liberating these communities and we resettle them in no distance you are going to see things changing.”

Umaru Garba Tella, Commissioner for Education & Human Capital, Adamawa State, explained that out of schools children menace is a national burden, calling on the sub-region governors to treat it with utmost importance.

“It is alarming and it is a mence , no nation will progress with high rate of this mence, the best place for a child is classroom. If we dont put in place a deliberate policies and actions to take off these children off the streets, I doubt if we are going to be productive as society, we must work together to address this lingering issues as sub-region.”

According to UNICEF, the project is funded by the Global Partnership for Education-Accelerated Fund (GPE-AF) and it will build on the gains of the previous GPE-AF, which occured from 2020-2023 and was implemented in 24 LGAs across the BAY States. During the previous project, UNICEF, Government and partners improved formal and non-formal education access, learning outcomes and continuity of learning for more than 180,000 conflict-affected children.