Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency forces one million children from school

Since the rise of Boko Haram in northeastern part of Nigeria and its neighboring countries at least one million children have been forced to remain out of school, reveals a report by UNICEF.

“It’s a staggering number”, Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s West and Central Africa regional director said, in the report.

Boko Haram’s insurgency has killed about 20,000 people and displaced 2.3 million, according to Amnesty International and the United Nations.

“The challenge we face is to keep children safe without interrupting their schooling”, Fontaine said.

Across the four affected countries, 2,000 schools have been closed and hundreds more have been attacked or burned by the group, which wants to establish a caliphate in Nigeria’s northeast and surrounding territory.

According to UNICEF, the one million children deprived of an education due to Boko Haram’s attacks is in addition to the estimated 11 million children of elementary school age who were already out of school in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger before the onset of the crisis.

UNICEF said in 2016, it would need almost 23 million dollars to provide access to education for children affected by conflicts in the four countries, most of whom live around the Lake Chad region.

Boko Haram insurgents operating in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger are so committed to keeping children from attending school that their Hausa name translates to “Western Education Is Forbidden”. And in schools that have reopened, classrooms are overcrowded.

“Together with governments, NGOs and other partners, UNICEF has set up temporary learning spaces, renovated and expanded schools, reaching 67,000 children”. The lack of education is likely to fuel further radicalism, because “the longer they stay out of school, the greater the risks of being abused, abducted and recruited by armed groups”, the UN’s children agency warns.

Eradicating Boko Haram will not solve the education issue in the region, said Yan St-Pierre, terrorism analyst at Modern Security Consulting Group. In 2014, Boko Haram launched an attack on a school in the Nigerian state of Yobe, killing 59 students.