Chibok, Twelve Years On: Why Nigeria Is Still Failing its Girls -By Molade Adeniyi

Twelve years ago, hundreds of girls across various communities in Borno State said goodbye to their loved ones and returned to the Government Girls Secondary School for final exams.

Many never came home.

On April, 14, 2014, the militant group Boko Haram stormed the school grounds kidnapping 276 students. Today, 89 of those girls still remain missing. Those who escaped or were eventually released carry wounds no rehabilitation programme has fully healed.

As Nigeria marked this grim anniversary last week, the Murtala Muhammed Foundation released a new report with a photographic exhibition titled ‘Stolen Daughters of Chibok’ and a warning that should stop all of us cold: Chibok has become a metaphor for neglect.

Those words sat with me as I walked through the photographic exhibition a few days ago. As an educator, who has spent more than a decade working in education and livelihoods in Nigeria, I know that the Chibok abduction was not just a security failure; it was a violent expression of what happens when a society decides that girls’ education is optional.

Boko Haram’s very name translates as “Western education is forbidden.” The girls in Chibok were targeted not despite the fact that they were in school, but because they were. Since this tragic incident, various militant groups across northern Nigeria have carried out at least 16 mass student abductions, with girls’ schools repeatedly singled out. More than 1,600 children have been kidnapped, according to Save the Children. Each time, the world watches. Each time, the hashtags trend. And each time, the attention fades before the work is done.

At Teach For Nigeria, we run the Let Girls Thrive programme across Ogun State. In the last year alone, we scaled from 50 to 206 Fellows working across 177 schools, reaching nearly 6,000 girl learners in hard-to-reach communities. We have seen what happens when a girl has an advocate in her classroom. School attendance climbs. Girls speak up in Science and Mathematics. They lead morning assemblies. They become class captains.

One of our Fellows, Esther Onyekwu, launched a hygiene and confidence club called Equip H.E.R. after noticing that poor menstrual hygiene was quietly pushing girls out of school. Another, Aanuoluwapo Adekanbi, created a self-development journal that helped girls in Ifo, Ogun State, set goals and speak affirmations and watched them transform from silent, disengaged students into girls who put their hands up and represent their schools in competitions. These stories are not miracles. They are what happens when someone decides a girl is worth investing in.

However, civil society alone cannot be the answer to a question that this entire country needs to answer together. We are working at the roots of a problem whose branches reach all the way to insecurity across the country, to cultural norms that still place a boy’s education above a girl’s, to government schools where there are no toilets, no teachers, and sometimes no safety.

For what we need to build, we need far more hands. We also need men. It is a truth that is too often left unspoken. Girls’ education is not a women’s issue. It is not something that mothers, NGOs, and female teachers can fix alone while men watch from the sideline.

There are boys who are taught that girls belong at the back of the classroom; that can change if we involve boys. There are fathers who decide that their son’s school fees matter more than their daughter’s; that can change if we involve fathers. And if religious and community leaders use their platforms to champion girls’ right to learn rather than to justify their exclusion, that too can spark change.

The boys sitting next to our girls in classrooms right now will become the men who raise the next generation of daughters. What we teach them today about girls’ worth through our actions or through our silence will echo for years to come.

And so we must remember the lessons of the Chibok abductions; not only in April, when the anniversary comes around, but in every meeting, every policy discussion, every fellowship cohort we recruit, every girl we mentor.

We owe every girl in Nigeria access to a safe, quality education and it will take many more of us to ensure that this happens. I am reminded of the popular African proverb – “Educate a woman, educate a nation.” and I ask the question, why aren’t we?

Molade Adeniyi is the CEO of Teach for Nigeria and a Public Voices Fellow Tackling Poverty, a partnership of Acumen and The OpEd Project.