This month, the Federal Government unveiled what it is calling a comprehensive reform of Nigeria’s Almajiri education system.
Street begging is now banned. Digital skills will be taught. Vocational training will be introduced. Every Almajiri learning centre must register with the government, capture biometric data of its pupils, and comply with new standards on health, sanitation, and accommodation. Graduates will receive nationally recognised certificates for the first time. Centres that violate the rules face closure.
The policy, approved under the Federal Ministry of Education, states plainly: “No learner shall be sent out to beg in the street or do menial jobs.”
It is a serious document. It contains good ideas. It should be welcomed.
It should also be read alongside another document one from 2012, when a previous Nigerian government made almost identical promises. And one from 2017, when investigators found those promises rotting in the sun.
What happened the last time
On April 10, 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan launched Nigeria’s Almajiri Schools Programme at Gagi in Sokoto State. He registered 25 pupils in a new model boarding school equipped with modern facilities the first of 400 such schools planned across the northern states, for which the government budgeted N15 billion.
The schools were designed to do exactly what this week’s policy promises integrate Western education into the Tsangaya system, with language laboratories, recitation halls, classrooms, dormitories, clinics, vocational workshops, dining halls, and quarters for teachers.
By 2017, five years after the launch, Daily Trust investigators visited the schools.
What they found was not education. Almajiri schools in Kaduna were characterised by lack of facilities. Bed bugs had taken over the majority of schools in the state. Reporters visiting three schools at Kawo and Unguwar Rimi observed that all the schools experienced shortages of teachers and classrooms, and lacked facilities such as laboratories, clinics, dining halls, dormitories, and writing materials.
In Zamfara, the Almajiri schools had been converted into conventional secondary schools. In Bauchi, where 9 Tsangaya Almajiri Model Schools were built and handed over to their proprietors, findings revealed that the schools had become inaccessible due to overgrown weeds, inviting cattle and other ruminants to graze. Facilities within the schools were stolen, rendering them counterproductive.
According to a former executive secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission, the schools were abandoned by northern governors because they wanted to be given cash to construct them. State governments left the schools unoccupied, abandoned, and vandalised because most refused to even take them over, not to talk of fulfilling their own obligations contained in the memoranda of understanding with the federal government.
More than a decade after the programme was launched, many of the schools remain abandoned or have been repurposed, despite the billions invested in their construction.
In 2022, UNICEF-linked figures put the number of out-of-school children in Bauchi at about 1.2 million. The very children the Jonathan programme was built to reach.
In January 2025, the current government announced plans to take over those 157 abandoned schools. Now, seven months later, it has unveiled an entirely new policy framework.
A child begging at a junction in Bauchi today is living with the same failure that the Jonathan-era programme was supposed to address fourteen years ago.
What the new policy says
The newly approved National Policy for the Enhancement of Almajiri Education is designed to modernise the traditional Qur’anic education system without altering its religious identity, while addressing child protection concerns and reducing the country’s out-of-school population.
Under the policy, digital skills, literacy, numeracy and vocational training will become part of the Almajiri curriculum. Graduates of recognised Almajiri schools will receive official certificates for the first time. Under the policy, Almajiri learning centres are required to register, capture learners’ biometric data, and comply with new standards on health, sanitation and accommodation.
The policy also places special emphasis on improving access to education for girls enrolled in Qur’anic schools, recognising their heightened vulnerability to neglect and limited educational opportunities.
Implementation will involve the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children Education, state governments, local education authorities, traditional rulers, parents, community leaders, and development partners.
That list of implementers is exactly where the problem lives.
Why the same plan keeps failing
The Almajiri system has survived every Nigerian government because the problem it represents is not primarily an educational one. It is a political one.
The families sending their sons to mallams in distant cities are not ignorant. They are making a rational calculation in a context where the state has never given them a reliable alternative. A rural family in Kebbi or Yobe with limited income and no nearby school that their son can attend is not choosing between the Almajiri system and a quality education. They are choosing between the Almajiri system and nothing.
No policy document changes that calculation. What changes it is schools actual physical schools, staffed by paid teachers, with textbooks and meals, within walking distance of where people live. Nigeria has consistently failed to provide enough well-funded public schools in many rural communities, particularly across the North.
The biometric registration requirement in the new policy is potentially significant. It could give the government a more accurate picture of who is enrolled in the Almajiri system. That is useful. But a database of children in a broken system is not a replacement for fixing the system. It is a more precise description of the failure. That is useful. But a database of children in a broken system is not a replacement for fixing the system. It is a more precise description of the failure.
The certification pathway is also genuinely new and potentially valuable if the certificates are recognised by employers and further education institutions. If they are not, they are paper. The policy does not specify what these certificates will actually unlock.
And the enforcement mechanism closure of centres that send children to beg is where the policy will live or die. Several previous attempts to reform the Almajiri system have struggled because of weak implementation, poor coordination and limited commitment at the state level. This policy requires state governments to register centres, enforce standards, and sanction violators. The federal government cannot close a Qur’anic school in Katsina. Only the Katsina State Government can. And the Katsina State Government, like every northern state government before it, will need political will that has so far not materialised.
What evidence-based reform would actually require
From a humanist perspective, the children in the Almajiri system are not a religious or cultural problem. They are children with the same capacity for learning, the same rights to education and safety, and the same futures to protect as any other Nigerian children.
What they need is not a policy document. They need teachers who are paid on time. They need classrooms that have roofs. They need meals that arrive. They need parents who have economic options other than sending their sons away at age six to survive on the generosity of strangers.
The new policy acknowledges that longstanding challenges in the system stem from inadequate funding, weak regulation, parental neglect, and widespread misconceptions. This is accurate. But funding, regulation, and misconceptions are symptoms. The disease is poverty… together with weak governance and inconsistent public investment. and the absence of state investment in the communities where these children live.
A government that is serious about ending street begging among Almajiri children will do three things that this policy does not specify: it will fund rural primary schools at a level that makes them genuinely attractive to families; it will pay Qur’anic teachers a salary so they are not dependent on child labour for their income; and it will hold northern state governments legally accountable for implementing the policy, not just ethically encouraged to do so.
Until those three things happen, the policy will be praised, launched, and forgotten. The children will still be at the junction. And in fourteen years, a new government will unveil a new framework.
The boy who was waiting in 2012 is now an adult. He did not get the school that was built for him.
The boy waiting today deserves better than another promise.
