Nigeria's Plan to Get More Girls Back in School

Nigeria has 10.5 million children out of school. Now the government is trying something new: multiple programs working together to bring girls back to education.

The most recent announcement is the Alternative High School for Girls program, backed by First Lady Senator Oluremi Tinubu. It offers a second chance for girls who had to drop out. But this is just one piece of a larger strategy. Several federal agencies and international organizations are launching different programs—some focused on basic skills, others on digital training, others on getting girls into regular secondary school. All of them aim at the same problem: too many girls in Nigeria aren't finishing their education.

What's Happening Now

The government's basic education agency, called UBEC, is setting up vocational schools and "second-chance centers" where girls can learn practical skills like entrepreneurship alongside reading and writing. They've already trained teachers in the hardest-hit regions, particularly the Northeast.

At the same time, the World Bank is running a program called AGILE in 18 Nigerian states. It focuses on getting girls aged 10 to 20 into secondary school and keeping them there.

Then there's adult literacy. The National Commission for Mass Literacy handles education for people 15 and older who never finished school. Recent figures show that among women in adult literacy programs, enrollment jumped from about 40 percent to 46 percent. But here's the gap: women's overall literacy is still 16 percentage points lower than men's, according to World Bank data.

Teaching Girls to Work Online

In 2023, the World Bank launched another program called "Gina Mata, Gina Al-Umma" in Northern Nigeria. It teaches girls digital skills—how to market products online, run e-commerce businesses, and do remote work. The program worked well enough that similar ideas are now being built into the larger AGILE project.

Some northern states are also getting creative. In Kano, teenage girls are learning robotics and computer science. But these programs still struggle against bigger obstacles: in northern Nigeria especially, many girls marry young and never attend school at all.

The real issue is that traditional classrooms alone won't solve Nigeria's education problem. Millions of girls have already fallen too far behind. That's why programs now offer different entry points—not just primary school, but also adult literacy, vocational training, and second-chance high schools for girls who are older.

Who's Running What

This brings us to how Nigeria is actually organizing this effort. The federal government handles policy and money. UBEC runs basic education programs. The National Commission for Mass Literacy runs adult programs. The World Bank funds secondary education initiatives and digital training. Individual states run their own alternative high schools.

It's like having different teams tackling different parts of the same problem. This makes sense because Nigeria's 36 states control much of their own education systems. But it also creates a risk: programs might overlap and waste money, or leave gaps where no one's helping.

The setup assumes that no single solution works everywhere. Girls in rural villages, girls in cities, girls who got married young, girls who had to work—they all need different kinds of help. Some need basic reading skills. Others need job training. Some need both.

Success won't be measured by test scores. Instead, the government will track how many girls enroll, how many finish, and whether they actually gain useful skills—whether that's literacy, entrepreneurship, or digital work.

What comes next depends on whether Nigeria's government can keep this coordinated effort going. A similar program in the 1970s and 1980s got millions of children into primary school quickly, but quality varied widely across regions and many girls still dropped out. Today's approach tries to learn from that by building skills training and digital literacy into programs from the start, not adding them later.

The hard part won't be launching programs. It will be making sure they talk to each other, don't waste money, and actually reach the millions of girls who need them. That requires sustained commitment—not just for one election cycle, but for years.