An Urgent Call to End School Abductions in Northern Nigeria
Every child has the right to learn without fear.
A school should be one of the safest places in a child’s life. It should be where children discover knowledge, develop friendships, build confidence and prepare for their future.
But across parts of northern Nigeria, the classroom has increasingly become a place of fear. The abduction of schoolchildren has become one of the most disturbing manifestations of Nigeria’s insecurity crisis. From Chibok to Dapchi, Kankara, Kagara, Kaduna, Kebbi and Niger State, the repeated targeting of schools has demonstrated that children are paying a devastating price for insecurity.
And when schools are closed because children cannot be protected, the consequences extend far beyond the period of closure.
A Crisis We Cannot Normalise
Nigeria entered 2026 with an already enormous education challenge. UNICEF reports that more than 10 million children remain out of school, while children who do attend school in conflict-affected areas face the additional risk of kidnapping. In the northeast, northwest and north-central regions, 8.4 million people, including 5 million children, require humanitarian assistance in 2026. More than 3.7 million people are displaced, with women and children making up about 70 percent of those displaced.
The education consequences are severe.
UNICEF’s 2025 end-of-year report documented that insecurity in the Northwest—including the abduction of 25 schoolgirls in Kebbi State and more than 300 students and 12 teachers in Niger State—led several states, including Katsina, Zamfara, Kebbi and Sokoto, to temporarily close schools as a preventive measure.
The situation remains serious in 2026.
In Askira-Uba Local Government Area of Borno State, only 56 of 113 primary schools were reported to be functioning as of August 2026. The local education authority also reported that approximately 80 students abducted during attacks in May and June remained in captivity at the time of the report.
These are not merely education statistics.
They are children whose classrooms have disappeared.
Closing Schools Cannot Become the Long-Term Solution.
We understand why governments close schools when credible threats emerge. The immediate responsibility must always be to protect children’s lives.
But temporary closure cannot become the country’s permanent response to insecurity.
Every prolonged school closure increases the risk of learning loss and permanent dropout. Children may become involved in child labour, early marriage or other harmful situations. Families may also lose confidence in formal education.
This is particularly dangerous for a country already struggling with a huge out-of-school population.
UNICEF’s 2026 humanitarian assessment specifically warns that attacks on schools and abductions of teachers and students are causing frequent closures in the Northwest and preventing hundreds of thousands of children from receiving consistent education.
Nigeria therefore faces a difficult but necessary task:
We must protect children without surrendering their education to insecurity.
Government must move from reaction to prevention. Nigeria already has a National Plan on Safe Schools and a National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre. The Federal Ministry of Education’s 2026 Standard Operating Procedure describes school protection as a multi-sector responsibility involving education authorities, security agencies, development partners and communities.
The issue is therefore not simply whether Nigeria has policies. The critical question is whether these policies are being implemented consistently in the communities where children are most vulnerable.
We call for the following actions:
1. Identify and Prioritise High-Risk Schools
Government should maintain regularly updated risk assessments of schools in conflict- and banditry-affected communities.
Schools facing credible threats should receive appropriate protection and contingency plans before an attack occurs.
Security planning should be proactive rather than waiting for another mass abduction before action is taken.
2. Strengthen Early-Warning and Rapid-Response Systems
Parents, teachers, traditional leaders and community members are often closest to emerging threats.
Government should strengthen confidential community-based early-warning systems that allow credible security information to reach the appropriate authorities quickly.
An early warning is valuable only when it leads to timely action.
3. Implement Safe-School Standards
School safety must go beyond deploying personnel after an incident.
Risk assessments, appropriate infrastructure, emergency communication, evacuation procedures, safeguarding mechanisms and trained personnel should form part of a comprehensive school-safety system.
Nigeria’s existing Minimum Standards for Safe Schools already provide a framework for identifying risks and strengthening school safety.
What is needed is consistent implementation, monitoring and accountability.
4. Guarantee Continuity of Learning
Where a school must temporarily close, children should not simply disappear from the education system.
Government, schools and development partners should establish safe temporary learning arrangements, accelerated education programmes and appropriate remote or blended learning options where feasible.
UNICEF’s 2025 response demonstrates that alternative approaches can help maintain learning during crises: in the Northeast, UNICEF and partners reached more than 674,000 children through education interventions, including community-based and blended-learning approaches.
5. Protect Teachers as Well as Students
Teachers are essential to education continuity, but they also face security risks.
Government should ensure that teachers working in high-risk areas have appropriate safety arrangements, emergency communication mechanisms and access to psychosocial support.
A school cannot function if both students and teachers are afraid to enter it.
6. Provide Psychosocial Support
A child who has experienced violence, displacement, threats or prolonged school disruption may need more than academic support.
Government and education partners should integrate child protection, psychosocial support and resilience programmes into education recovery.
Children need safe adults who can listen to them, help them process difficult experiences and support their return to learning.
7. Hold Institutions Accountable
Funding for safe schools must produce measurable results.
Government should regularly report on the number of schools assessed, protected, rehabilitated and supported; the number of children benefiting; and gaps that remain.
Accountability should not be treated as criticism of government. It should be recognised as a necessary part of protecting public resources and children’s lives.
We Must Refuse to Abandon a Generation
The danger is not only that children may be abducted.
The greater long-term danger is that fear may gradually convince an entire generation that education is too dangerous to pursue.
That cannot become Nigeria’s reality.
A child born in Borno, Kaduna, Kebbi, Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Niger or any other part of the country should have the same right to education and safety as a child anywhere else. Geography must never determine whether a child gets to learn.
A Call to Government
We therefore call on the Federal Government, state governments, security agencies, education authorities, traditional institutions, communities and development partners to treat attacks on schools as an urgent national child-protection and education emergency.
And most importantly, children must remain at the centre of every decision.
Nigeria has already demonstrated that it can develop policies and mobilise resources for safer schools. The next step is ensuring that those commitments reach the children and communities that need them most.
We cannot keep closing schools every time children are threatened and call that a solution. And we must ensure that no child loses their future because the adults responsible for protecting them failed to act early enough.
