Out-of-School Children: Using a Gendered Analysis for North-East Nigeria

International Women’s Day commemoration on 10th March 2022 underscored the need to reflect on the challenges women suffer due to entrenched norms and practices that structure institutions and processes in many developing countries like Nigeria. These setbacks are visible in education, mainly as it affects the girl child. Although quality education is the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) which Nigeria commits to, many female children are still out of school. A 2021 report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that over ten million children were out of school in Nigeria as of 2018. Of this figure, over three million were female children. Further analysis of the report revealed that the North-East alone accounted for 17.10 per cent of the country\’s estimated total female out-of-school children.

Studies have linked the growth of out-of-school children to the years of violent conflict orchestrated by the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East. A previous study by Nextier SPD revealed that the Nigerian Government\’s efforts to address the challenge of out-of-school children in the North had not yielded the desired result. Hence, there is a need to examine the root causes of out-of-school female children within the broader perspective of structural violence perpetrated against the girl-child in the North-East.

This edition of Nextier SPD Policy Weekly briefly interrogates how structural violence suffered by women in the North-East contributes to the region’s high number of out-of-school female children.

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