The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)  lamented that presently there are about 1.5 millions children estimated to be out of school across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states respectively.

The UN agency urged the critical stakeholders to scale up funding in the education sectors which it described as an education emergency crisis in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.

UNICEF Education Manager who is also the Officer-in-Charge, Chief of Borno Field Office, Mr Gilmar Teddy Zambrana Cruz disclosed this during a two-day UNICEF GPE-AF project on Education and Learning for Children in Emergencies in North-East Nigeria held in Maiduguri on Wednesday.

He noted that education should be given priority and urging the states government in three most affected by insurgency to ensure children not only have access  to learning centres but must be safe and secure for learning.

“We have a learning crisis in the northeast of Nigeria, we estimate around two million out of school children especially in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states respectively. We are working together with the state government and ministries to address these challenges, we are helping the government to implement the programs that would help the children to come back to schools but also to help them address the delay they may have in learning.

“We expect that this programme will change the education conditions of children, we have done that in the past we have similar experience and we change the education conditions of 180, 000 children in the BAY states,”he urged.

Also speaking Borno State Universal Basic Education Board Prof Bulama Kagu noted that,” Yes we are challenged as regards to out of school children. We are just recovering from insurgency not all the local government are liberated from the chakle of Boko Haram when you talk about Abadam, Guzamala and Kala-Balge local government areas still have challenges of insecurity.

“I can assure you that by the time we are succeeding liberating these communities and we resettle them in no distance you are going to see things changing.”

The Adamawa State Commissioner for Education and Human Capital, Dr. Umaru Garba Tella explained that out of schools children menace is a national burden  and call on the sub-region governors to treat it with utmost importance.

“It is alarming and it is a menace , no nation will progress with the high rate of this menace, the best place for a child is the classroom. If we don’t put in place deliberate policies and actions to take off these children off the streets, I doubt if we are going to be productive as society, we must work together to address these lingering issues as sub-regions.”

According to UNICEF, the project is funded by the Global Partnership for Education – Accelerated Fund (GPE-AF) and it will build on the gains of the previous GPE-AF which occurred from 2020-2023 and was implemented in 24 LGAs across the BAY states.

During the previous project, UNICEF, government and partners improved formal and non-formal education access, learning outcomes and continuity of learning for more than 180,000 conflict-affected children.