The Boy on the Road
He is easy to miss. He stands at a junction in Kano, Kaduna, or Bauchi bare feet on hot asphalt, a tin bowl in his hand, wearing clothes that have not been washed in days. He is somewhere between six and twelve years old. He does not know the name of this city. He was sent here by his father, given to a mallam he had never met, and told that this was the path to knowledge.
His name is Almajiri.
There are millions of him. In 2006, there were already 1.2 million Almajirai in Kano State alone. That figure is now twenty years old — and the conditions that produced it have not improved. Across Northern Nigeria today, researchers and government officials estimate the numbers run into the tens of millions. These are not orphans. They are not runaways. They are children whose families made a deliberate decision a decision shaped by centuries of tradition, colonial disruption, and decades of government failure.
This is the story of how that decision came to be. And what it has cost.
What It Was: A System That Once Worked
The word “Almajiri” is derived from the Arabic “Al muhajirun” meaning an emigrant. It refers to a person who migrates from his home to a popular teacher in the quest for Islamic knowledge.
During the pre-colonial era, the Almajiri education system originally called the Tsangaya was established under the Kanem-Borno Empire, one of the oldest ruling empires in the world, extending from the frontiers of Northern Nigeria across the Chadian region up to the borders of Libya. It was established as an organized and comprehensive system of education for learning Islamic principles, values, jurisprudence and ultimately the recitation and memorization of the Quran.
This was not a marginal or informal arrangement. Modelled after madrasahs in other parts of the Muslim world, Tsangaya was funded largely by the state. Islam traditionally encourages charity, so the community readily supported these Almajirai. In return, the Almajirai gave back to the society, mostly through manual labour.
The system produced scholars, judges, and administrators. By 1906, one graduate of the Almajiri tradition Alhassan Dantata was using steamships to move merchandise between Accra, Sekondi and Lagos. By the time he died, he was the wealthiest man in West Africa. He had started as a boy sent to a mallam in Bebeji.
The Almajiri system, at its height, was not a symbol of poverty. It was a functioning educational infrastructure one that trained the intellectual class of an entire region.
What Broke It: The Colonial Erasure
The pillars of the system started falling when the British invaded Northern Nigeria and took control of the state treasury. They killed and disposed those emirs who resisted foreign rule, while those who were subjugated lost their territories and accepted their new roles as mere traditional rulers. The British also refused to recognize the Almajiri education system as an important form of education, arguing that they were mere religious schools. Western education was introduced and funded instead.
This was not a neutral policy decision. It was a deliberate dismantling.
With this loss of support, the system collapsed. The pupils, and their mallams, having no financial support, resorted to begging.
The British did not replace what they removed. They funded Western schools in the south at a far greater rate than in the north, creating an educational gap between the two regions that still defines Nigeria today. Northern Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in Nigeria. According to UNICEF, 10.5 million children are out of school in Nigeria.
The Almajiri system survived but as a hollow version of itself. What had once been a state-funded educational institution became an informal network of Quranic schools where children begged on the streets to feed themselves and their mallams. The knowledge remained. The support had been taken away.
What Governments Did: Promises Without Infrastructure
Nigeria has been independent since 1960. In the decades since, the Almajiri system has been studied, debated, condemned, and occasionally reformed but never fundamentally fixed.
In 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan launched an Almajiri Schools programme, building over 150 model schools that combined Quranic education with Western subjects. The programme was widely praised. Within years, most of the schools had been abandoned — underfunded, understaffed, and swallowed by bureaucratic neglect.
A key distinction in Nigeria’s Almajiri model is the disconnect between informal Quranic education and formal state policy. Colonial and post-colonial shifts significantly altered this model. The British colonial administration disrupted traditional structures without providing alternatives, and post-independence governments failed to integrate Islamic and Western educational systems.
The result is a system that exists in the gap between two worlds too informal for the state to regulate, too entrenched to disappear. And in that gap, something else has moved in.
The Recruitment Ground
Boko Haram’s emergence in Northern Nigeria is closely tied to systemic vulnerabilities within the Almajiri system. Founded by Mohammed Yusuf an Almajiri graduate himself the terror group exploited socio-cultural fractures, leveraging identity-based grievances, economic deprivation, and governance failures to recruit marginalised Almajirai. While the Almajiri system itself does not inherently radicalise individuals, it produces a large, unemployed youth demographic with a strong collective identity, creating fertile ground for extremist exploitation.
The logic is straightforward. A boy who leaves home at age six, spends his childhood begging on streets in a city where he has no family, receives no formal education, and reaches adulthood with no skill, no certificate, and no economic pathway that boy is not looking for ideology. He is looking for belonging. For purpose. For someone who sees him.
Almajiri children find themselves destitute, with little or no formal education, begging to survive, and often swept into religious clashes. Groups like Boko Haram did not create these conditions. They simply arrived after the state had already abandoned these children and offered what the state had not: a community, an identity, and a mission.
In Kaduna and Kano, 83% and 92% of respondents respectively pointed to unemployment and poverty as key drivers of radicalisation. These are not ideological statistics. They are economic ones.
The Numbers That Should Have Ended This Debate
The scale of what is happening in Northern Nigeria is not hidden. It has been documented, reported, and published for decades.
The Almajiri system, historically rooted in Northern Nigeria’s precolonial Islamic scholarship, has devolved into a complex humanitarian crisis. Once a revered educational tradition, the system is now associated with street begging, child neglect, disease vulnerability, and radicalization risks.
Millions of children are being sent into this system every year. Their parents are not cruel they are following a tradition that once made sense, in a context where the state has never offered a credible alternative. The family in a rural village in Zamfara or Kebbi that sends a son to a mallam in a distant city is not choosing ignorance. They are choosing the only educational option they know and trust.
The tragedy is not the parents. The tragedy is the state that has spent sixty years promising to fix this and has not.
What Would Actually Change Things
The Almajiri system will not end through condemnation. It will end when it is replaced not by force, but by something better.
This involves tackling economic inequality, ending the exploitative aspects of the Almajiri education system, creating jobs, and providing an education that equips vulnerable children with the essential skills to resist radicalisation and compete effectively with their counterparts in southern Nigeria.
That means schools in the communities where these children live not distant model schools that close after the cameras leave. It means mallams who are trained, paid, and integrated into a national curriculum rather than left to survive on the generosity of children. It means a government that treats the education of a child in Borno State with the same urgency it applies to children anywhere else in the country.
The boy at the junction is not a symbol of culture. He is a symbol of what happens when a state decides, generation after generation, that certain children do not count.
He has a name. He had a future. Someone took it from him before he was old enough to know what it was.
