In November 2025, armed men stormed a girls’ boarding school in Maga, Kebbi State, at 4am. They shot the vice principal. They took 25 girls from their dormitory.
Most were returned three weeks later. One had escaped on her own.
The attack received international coverage for a few days. Then another crisis arrived, and attention moved elsewhere.
But even before the gunmen came, most of those girls were already in danger of never completing their education. Not from bullets from the quieter, slower forces that remove girls from school across Northern Nigeria every year without making any headlines at all.
The numbers
Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world.
UNICEF’s 2024 report places the figure at 18.3 million made up of 10.2 million children of primary school age and 8.1 million of junior secondary school age.
69 percent of Nigeria’s out-of-school children are in northern states. Bauchi, where I live, has the highest number of any state 1.1 million children not in school.
Girls are disproportionately represented in every one of these figures.
In the north-eastern and north-western states, female primary net attendance rates are 47.7 percent and 47.3 percent respectively meaning more than half of girls are not in school.
In the North-West, literacy rates reach only 9.5 percent, compared to 87 percent in Lagos State.
An estimated 7.6 million girls remain out of school in Nigeria about half of them in Northern Nigeria.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent millions of girls whose educational opportunities are being shaped by systems they had no part in creating.
For many girls, the outcome is early marriage
For many girls, one of the most common outcomes is early marriage.
45.7 percent of girls in Northern Nigeria are married before the age of 18, often marking the end of their formal education.
Nigeria has over 24 million underage brides. Girls begin dropping out of school by age 14 at higher rates than boys. Child marriage, poverty, and gender bias remain major barriers to girls’ education, particularly in Northern Nigeria, where cultural norms and perceptions of low-quality schooling often lead families to prioritise early marriage over continued education.
UNICEF found that the median age at first marriage rises from 16.6 years for girls with no education to 21.7 years for those who complete secondary school.
That single statistic points to a clear policy argument. Keeping girls in school is associated with later marriage and better long-term outcomes, including improved health, lower child mortality and greater economic opportunity. Most importantly, education gives girls more choices about what their future can look like beyond early marriage.
Development partners have shown that if every girl in Northern Nigeria completed secondary school, child marriage could fall by almost two-thirds while adolescent pregnancy would decline sharply.
The evidence points in a clear direction: keeping girls in school is one of the strongest interventions available for delaying child marriage. Nigeria already has evidence that these approaches can work. The challenge is taking them to the scale required.
This did not start with Boko Haram
The crisis predates Boko Haram, although the insurgency has made the situation dramatically worse in many parts of Northern Nigeria.
Nearly two-thirds of women in the North West and North East regions have no education, compared to less than 15 percent in the South South. These are women who were never in school — decades before the insurgency began. The gap between north and south on girls’ education has roots that run deeper than any single event.
Those roots are economic, cultural, and structural and they are connected.
Economic: When a family is poor, education has a cost — school fees, uniforms, materials, the income the child could have earned instead of sitting in a classroom. In some households, the perceived economic return on educating a girl may be lower than that of educating a boy, particularly where early marriage is common and families expect daughters to move into their husband’s household. The result is a difficult economic calculation: families facing poverty may prioritise immediate household needs over the longer-term benefits of a girl’s education.
Cultural: In some communities where girls are expected to prioritise marriage and motherhood, continued education may be seen as less important or, in some cases, as incompatible with those expectations. Girls who remain in school longer tend to marry later and may have fewer children. In subsistence farming communities already under economic stress, the perceived loss of household labour can become another factor shaping decisions about girls’ education, even among families that are not hostile to women in principle.
Structural: In northeastern and north western states, 29 percent and 35 percent of Muslim children respectively receive Qur’anic education which does not include basic literacy and numeracy. Many girls receive religious education outside the formal school system, but that education may not provide the recognised qualifications, literacy and numeracy skills, or other credentials needed to access further education and formal employment. They are not necessarily idle they are learning. The problem is that the education available to them may not give them the same opportunities as formal schooling.
And then there is the school itself. Crumbling infrastructure, lack of data, and poor quality teaching and learning can make schools less attractive and less accessible to families. The absence of safe toilets, female teachers and adequate security can create additional barriers for girls, particularly in communities where concerns about safety and privacy already affect decisions about schooling. The quality of the institution matters for enrolment, yet investment in school infrastructure and teaching quality remains inadequate in many parts of Northern Nigeria.
What the evidence says works
This is not a problem without solutions. The solutions have been tested.
Between 2012 and 2022, the UK government invested $109 million in the Girls Education Project (GEP3) across six Northern Nigerian states, in partnership with UNICEF and the Nigerian federal government.
The programme reported substantial gains. Girls’ enrolment increased from 1.76 million to 2.87 million a 64 percent increase while gender parity across the six states rose from 0.73 to 0.97. The programme estimated that 1.5 million additional girls were enrolled as a result of the intervention.
The gains did not come from a single intervention. They resulted from a combination of measures:
Modest unconditional cash transfers of $45 to indigent households, combined with community mobilisation and enrolment drives, school and learning centre grants to fix infrastructure, and investment in early grade reading and numeracy through structured teaching methods.
The cash transfer was modest $45 per household but it was only one part of a broader package of interventions designed to keep girls in school. The programme spent $109 million over ten years across six states. Nigeria’s defence budget for a single year exceeds $3 billion.
The question, then, is not simply whether Nigeria can find the resources. It is whether educating girls is being treated as the political priority that the evidence demands.
The law already says all of this
As a Law student, I keep coming back to what Nigerian law actually says and what the distance between law and reality reveals about political will.
The Child Rights Act 2003 establishes protections for children’s rights, including the right to education, and prohibits child marriage and the exploitation of children.
The Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act 2015 prohibits forced marriage and provides legal protections against related forms of violence and abuse.
The Nigerian Constitution directs the state to provide free, compulsory and universal primary education when practicable.
On paper, Nigerian law provides children with rights to education and protections against child marriage. In practice, Nigeria has over 24 million underage brides and 7.6 million girls out of school.
A law that is not effectively enforced offers little protection to the people it is meant to protect. The Child Rights Act has not been domesticated by all northern states. The Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act remains poorly understood and unevenly enforced in many communities where the practices it prohibits are most common. The constitutional guarantee of free education coexists with schools that charge fees, lack teachers, and crumble at the edges.
The girl in Maga
She was taken from her dormitory at 4am. Being kidnapped did not make her more Nigerian, more Muslim, or more Hausa. It made her a victim of a failure of protection, part of a wider failure that keeps millions of other girls from completing their education through quieter means.
Her capacity to learn was no less than that of any boy in a classroom in Lagos or Abuja. What differed was the level of protection and investment available to her.
This is not simply a question of culture. Cultural expectations can influence decisions about girls’ education, but institutions and governments determine whether schools are built, teachers are paid, and families receive the support they need to keep girls in class. The $45 household transfer was one practical intervention that helped reduce the financial barriers keeping girls out of school.
The solution is not another argument about who is to blame. It is practical action: investment in schools worth attending, enforcement of laws that already exist, and the recognition that a girl’s life is worth the same as a boy’s in policy, in budgets, and in the classrooms that are still not being built.
The girls who never came back to school did not disappear simply because Northern Nigeria does not value them.
They disappeared because the systems designed to keep them in classrooms, safe, with options were never built strongly enough to hold them.
That is a choice. And choices can be changed.
