Quote from Sunday on ,

Ten states were homes to more than half of Nigeria’s out-of-school children, data published in the 2018 digest of basic education statistics by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) shows.

The data was also published last month by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its 2020 report on women and men. It shows that a quarter of Nigeria’s 40.8 million school-age children were not attending primary education.
The 10 states at the top of the chart had about 5.2 million of the country’s about 10.2 million out-of-school children.

Kano State had the most with 989,234, while Akwa-Ibom (581,800), Katsina (536,122) and Kaduna (524,670) followed closely.

Other states that ranked high on the list are Taraba (499,923), Sokoto (436,570), Yobe (427,230), Zamfara (422,214) and Bauchi (354,373).

The states with the lowest numbers of out-of-school children were Cross River with 97,919, Abia with 91,548, Kwara with 84,247, Enugu with 82,051, Bayelsa with 53,079, FCT with 52,972 and Ekiti with 50,945.

Meanwhile, the national estimate of 10.2 million itself is a quarter of the country’s school-age population at the time – children between six and 11 years – 40.8 million.

Although education minister, Adamu Adamu, said earlier this year that the figure has dropped to 6.9 million, no official data is available to substantiate this.

This means that as of 2018, for every four Nigerian children between the ages of 6 and 11 years, one had no access to primary school education.

Boys were worse affected as they made up 62 per cent of the national total, with girls making up the remaining 38 per cent.