NGO says 3 million children need education in North-East

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February 24, 2017 4:34 PM

Foot said “Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world even prior to the insurgency in the North East.”

The UN has warned of an impending humanitarian disaster and charity Save the Children says 4.7 million people in northeast Nigeria need food assistance

An international NGO, Save the Children, on Friday, says more than three million children are in need of education in North Eastern Nigeria.

The Country Director of the organisation in Nigeria, Mr Ben Foot, made this known in a statement by Mr James Bigila, the Media Coordinator of the group in Abuja.

Bigila quoted Foot as saying “Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world even prior to the insurgency in the North East.”

Foot told the 2017 Humanitarian Conference on Nigeria and the Lake Chad Region currently underway in Oslo, the capital of Norway that more than half of the 700 children attending one of the NGO’s pre-school programme in Borno in January 2017 were aged six or older, with many teenagers aged up to 15.

He, however, described the desperate quest for education by the children as a reflection of the hunger for knowledge that was not met.

According to him, it is an indication of an education crisis across the Lake Chad region of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad.

He identified the North East region as accounting for a quarter of the world’s estimated 59 million out-of-school children.

Foot said about 80 per cent of some one million children displaced by conflict were living in remote host communities, with little or no access to education, describing the situation as “particularly terrible for girls.”

He explained that while the average Nigerian was expected to receive nine years of schooling, the figure for girls dropped to just two years in the North-East.

“Children as old as 15 are flooding pre-school facilities in desperate effort to learn, after more than seven years of conflict compounded the world’s worst education crisis in North-East Nigeria,” Foot added.

He said that “a staggering 1,200 schools have been destroyed, while at least 611 teachers have been reported murdered and a further 19,000 displaced. This equates to one school being attacked for every two days of the conflict."

“This desperate quest for education reflects the hunger of children for knowledge that is not being met, which is heart-breaking."

“The insurgency is based on an ideology that western education is evil and that children, teachers and schools are legitimate targets.”

The Norway conference held on Feb. 24, aimed at drawing attention to the crises and to mobilise greater international involvement and increased funding for humanitarian efforts to prevent the situation from deteriorating further.

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