Nigeria's Multi-Track Plan to Get More Girls Back in School

President Bola Tinubu has revived the Alternative High School for Girls initiative, led by First Lady Senator Oluremi Tinubu. The program offers a second chance at education for girls who dropped out of school. It's one piece of a larger federal strategy to tackle Nigeria's education crisis: roughly 10.5 million children are out of school, and far more girls than boys face barriers to staying in classrooms.

This initiative is happening alongside several other programs working on the same problem, all at different levels of Nigeria's government. The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) has opened vocational schools and second-chance learning centers specifically for girls, teaching practical skills and business training. Meanwhile, the World Bank runs a program called AGILE across 18 Nigerian states, focused on getting girls aged 10 to 20 into secondary school and helping them finish.

How the Federal Government is Organizing This

The UBEC's Department of Special Programmes coordinates these programs across the country, trying to ensure access, fairness, and quality for children who fell behind. In 2021, the commission trained teachers at vocational schools and second-chance centers, with particular focus on the North-East—the region where educational gaps are widest.

A separate agency, the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-Formal Education (NMEC), handles literacy and skills training for adolescents and adults aged 15 and up. It trains state officials and develops plans to help older youth and adults gain basic reading skills.

The numbers show how much work remains. In 2020, women made up 40.55 percent of adults enrolled in literacy classes. By a later period, that rose to 46.10 percent. Yet overall, women's literacy rates still lag men's by 16 percentage points, according to World Bank gender data. That gap tells you how many women Nigeria still needs to reach.

Teaching Girls Digital Skills

The World Bank launched a 2023 program called 'Gina Mata, Gina Al-Umma' that teaches digital skills—things like online marketing, e-commerce, and remote work—to girls and young women in Northern Nigeria. The lessons learned from that program have been fed back into the larger AGILE project, showing how successful smaller initiatives can reshape bigger ones.

In northern states like Kano, some teenage girls now have access to robotics and computer science classes. But challenges persist: many families in northern Nigeria, where cultural traditions and early marriage are common, still keep girls out of formal schooling. Getting girls into classrooms remains harder here than elsewhere in the country.

The wider point here is that Nigeria's government recognizes traditional schools alone won't solve a problem this large. UNESCO research shows Nigeria has designed special literacy programs for women, but also notes a shortage of female instructors in adult education programs across northern Nigeria—a significant barrier in conservative areas where women may be hesitant to learn from men.

What Individual States Are Doing

State governments are building their own complementary programs. Sokoto State included second-chance education and women's literacy in its 2022 Demographic Dividend Roadmap, alongside reforms to its traditional Almajiri school system. Osun State announced its Alternative High School for Girls is moving into full operation.

The federal government frames all this under a campaign called 'Education as a Powerful Tool for Change.' But implementing it faces real obstacles. In Nigeria's federal system, states control primary schools while federal agencies set policy and provide funding—a division that can slow coordination and create gaps in coverage.

There's precedent for this approach working at scale. During Nigeria's Universal Primary Education campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, federal coordination helped enroll millions of children rapidly. That said, not all those children actually finished school, and quality and completion rates varied sharply by region and between boys and girls. The current strategy appears designed to avoid those earlier pitfalls by embedding practical skills and digital training from the start—not as afterthoughts, but as core parts of the curriculum.

The System They've Built

Nigeria now has a patchwork of institutions handling different pieces of this puzzle: UBEC manages basic education programs, NMEC runs adult literacy, the World Bank focuses on secondary school and digital skills, and states run alternative schools. Each agency has its own role.

This scattered approach reflects something Nigeria has learned the hard way: no single program can work across a country with such different geographic areas, cultures, and economic realities. Many girls have already passed the age where they'd normally start school, so second-chance pathways are essential. The programs also recognize that girls won't stay in school just for literacy—they need economic opportunity too, which is why entrepreneurship and digital skills are part of the plan.

Success here will probably be measured by enrollment numbers, completion rates, and whether students actually gain usable skills—not by standardized test scores. The diverse starting points of the students make traditional testing less meaningful.

The real risk is operational. Multiple agencies running similar programs in the same area could waste money, duplicate effort, and leave some girls unreached while others are served twice over. The Federal Ministry of Education's coordination work will be critical. Without it, these programs could end up competing rather than complementing each other.

Nigeria's approach acknowledges something important: fixing education takes both immediate action for the millions already out of school and long-term changes to prevent others from falling through the cracks. Whether this multi-track strategy can actually reach the scale needed—and whether it can be sustained when political attention shifts—remains to be seen. That depends on money, coordination, and political leaders staying committed beyond the next election cycle.