20 million children are out-of-school in Nigeria -UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), said Nigeria currently has about 20 million out-of-school children.

The statistics in UNESCO’s latest global data showed that India, Nigeria and Pakistan have the highest figures for out-of-school children globally.

According to the data, there are 244 million children and youth between the ages of six and 18 worldwide who are still out of school.

The figure in Nigeria was between 10.5 and 13.5 million. However, most children have been forced out of school with the incessant insecurity and kidnapping of school children.

The UNESCO statement partly reads: “The new estimates, published online by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, showed that sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the most children and youths out of school. It is also the only region where this number is increasing; out-of-school rates are falling more slowly than the rate at which the school-age population is growing.

“The region with the second highest out-of-school population is Central and Southern Asia with 85 million. The top three countries with the most children and youth excluded from education are: India, Nigeria and Pakistan.”

On his part, Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Silvia Montoya said efficient use of the data is crucial to addressing the rifts towards achieving the fourth goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

He said: “UNESCO has long underscored the need to make more efficient use of the data we have. That’s why we’ve brought together administrative data with information from surveys and censuses. By using multiple data sources, gaps are filled, data trends are smoothed, and we can draw consistent time series.”