The Internally Displaced Child Nobody Is Counting -By Stephen Sunday Laabes

Nigeria has nearly three million displaced people. The majority are children. Most of them are not in school. And the country is having a different conversation entirely.

She carries her school uniform in a polythene bag. Not because she is going to school. Because she cannot bring herself to leave it behind, and the polythene bag is the most reliable container available in the camp. Her name is not important to the agencies that count her. Her age is a data point in a humanitarian report. Her uniform, faded from washing in whatever water was available, folded with the care of someone who is preserving the last physical evidence of a life that used to have a different shape, does not appear in any indicator that the Nigerian government tracks or any metric that its international partners report against. She is eight years old. She has been in this camp in Borno State for two years. She has not been in a classroom for two years. And she is, by every honest measure available, a child that Nigeria has decided it cannot afford to count properly.

I want to write about her because the conversation Nigeria is having about education does not include her. The twenty million out-of-school children figure that appears in every education speech and every development report is a national aggregate that flattens the specific and compounding crisis of displacement into the general crisis of educational exclusion. The displaced child is not simply another out-of-school child. She is a child who was in school, who had the routine and the social world and the daily structure that school provides, who had a home and a community and a relationship to a future, and who lost all of those things at once when the violence or the flood or the banditry arrived and everything that made her life legible was suddenly gone. The educational loss she is experiencing is not simply the absence of schooling. It is the absence of continuity, of stability, of the sense that what she learns today connects to something she will be tomorrow. It is a loss that compounds every other loss and that the humanitarian system has been addressing, with partial funding and partial reach and the chronic inconsistency of a response built on project cycles rather than on the long-term commitment the situation demands.

Nigeria has two point nine million internally displaced people. Two million of them are in the northeast, in areas affected by the Boko Haram insurgency and its aftermath. Five hundred and fourteen thousand are in three violence-affected states in the northwest, where banditry and farmer-herder conflict have driven communities from land their families worked for generations. Four hundred thousand are in Benue State in the north-central, where communal violence and flooding have produced a displacement crisis that receives less international attention than the northeast but is no less devastating for the people inside it. These numbers are from UNICEF’s 2026 humanitarian appeal, which requires two hundred and fifty-five million US dollars to deliver nutrition, water, health, child protection, and education assistance to five point four million people in Nigeria, including three point eight million children. Borno State alone hosts one point seven million displaced persons. Nine hundred and twenty-four thousand of them live in two hundred and fifty camps.

Sixty percent of the displaced population in the northeast are children. One in four is under the age of five. These are not abstract demographics. They are the specific human reality of a crisis that has been producing displaced children in Nigeria for over a decade, since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009, and that has never received the sustained, adequately resourced, long-term response that its scale demands. As of 2025, sixty-nine percent of children living in IDP camps across Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states lack access to education services. Sixty-nine percent. In a country that claims universal basic education as a constitutional commitment and an international obligation, nearly seven in ten displaced children in these states are not in school. Not because no one built a school nearby. Because the system that was supposed to serve them was not designed for people who no longer live where the system expected them to be.

This is the core of the displaced child’s specific educational crisis and it is worth understanding precisely. The Nigerian education system is built around permanence. Schools are assigned to communities. Teachers are deployed to locations. Budgets are allocated to local government areas. The entire administrative architecture of basic education assumes that the child lives in the place where the system has been designed to reach her. When a family is displaced, they leave the administrative unit that was supposed to serve them and arrive in a unit that was not designed to absorb them. The school in the IDP camp, where it exists, is often a temporary structure, a tent or a repurposed building, staffed by teachers who may or may not be paid by anyone, operating without the curriculum materials and the examination access and the formal enrolment procedures that would allow a child’s learning to be recognised and built upon if she ever manages to return home or move to a new permanent location. The displaced child is not simply outside the system. She is in the gap between systems, and the gap has no one responsible for closing it.

The data from Borno State illustrates the depth of this gap with a clarity that should disturb anyone who reads it. In 2021 and 2022, one hundred and sixty thousand internally displaced persons were relocated from camps to more permanent situations. In 2023, the number relocated was zero. In 2024, ten thousand. The pace of return and relocation has effectively stalled, which means the population in the camps is not a transitional population moving through a temporary situation toward a permanent one. It is a population that has been in camps, in many cases, for years. For the eight-year-old carrying her school uniform in a polythene bag, two years in the camp means two years of her primary school education, the years during which foundational literacy and numeracy are either established or not, have passed without the structured learning that would have established them. The research on the long-term consequences of educational disruption in the early primary years is unambiguous: the gaps opened in those years do not close automatically when schooling resumes. They require intensive, targeted intervention that the system is not providing at the scale required.

There is a child I want you to know about alongside the girl with the uniform, because her story is the thing that makes this essay refuse despair entirely even as it refuses false comfort. Her name is Mary Zira. She lives in the Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria displacement camp in Yola, Adamawa State, a camp established over a decade ago for people displaced from Mubi, Michika, Madagali, and other communities devastated by Boko Haram. In 2023 a young woman named Vivian Ibrahim introduced chess to the children in the camp, not as therapy, not as a development programme with a log-frame and a theory of change, but as a game that required thought and attention and the specific concentration that makes a child feel, perhaps for the first time in years, that her mind is a resource rather than a liability. Mary learned chess. Then she got very good at chess. Then in 2025 she travelled to Georgia, competed in the Chess Community Games, won a silver medal, and was invited to speak at the United Nations. Someone who attended was so impressed that they offered to sponsor her secondary school education. She is currently in a private boarding school. Her mother said: I am a very proud mother. I had never imagined her daughter’s life would change overnight because of a game.

Mary Zira’s story is extraordinary and it is also, if you read it carefully, an indictment. Not of the chess initiative, which is beautiful and which Vivian Ibrahim built from genuine love with almost no resources. But of the system that made a chess programme the thing that changed Mary’s trajectory. Mary Zira should not have needed Vivian Ibrahim and a chess board and a silver medal and an impressed stranger with money to access secondary school education. She should have had a pathway to secondary school education that the state provided because the state has a constitutional obligation to provide it. The fact that her educational future depended on a sequence of extraordinary events rather than on a functioning system is not a heartwarming exception to a difficult situation. It is evidence of how completely the system has failed the children in her camp and the hundreds of thousands of children in camps across the northeast and northwest who do not have a Vivian Ibrahim, who have not been discovered by a stranger, who are carrying their school uniforms in polythene bags and waiting for a pathway that the state owes them and has not built.

The humanitarian response to displacement in Nigeria is real and it saves lives. UNICEF and its partners are delivering nutrition, health, water, sanitation, and education assistance across eight targeted states. The Jesuit Refugee Service is providing education and hygiene support in IDP camps including the New Kuchingoro camp in Abuja, where roughly four hundred students are receiving learning materials and teacher support. In Benue State’s Mega Camp in Makurdi, UNICEF and partners are running gender-based violence programming, psychosocial support, and education continuation for displaced children including fourteen-year-old Dooshima Kwaghbee, who fled Kadrako village with her family after an armed attack and told UNICEF: thanks to the efforts of the Benue State government, UNICEF and other partners, I can continue my schooling here without fear. These programmes matter. The people delivering them are doing work of genuine importance in conditions of genuine difficulty.

But the humanitarian response has a structural problem that no amount of dedication on the part of the people delivering it can solve. It is funded on project cycles that are shorter than the displacement crisis they are addressing. UNICEF’s 2026 appeal requires two hundred and fifty-five million dollars. It will not be fully funded, because humanitarian appeals in Nigeria have not been fully funded in any recent year, because the international community’s appetite for sustained engagement with protracted crises is always less than the rhetoric of humanitarian commitment suggests. The programmes that are implemented will be implemented inconsistently across the affected area, reaching some camps and some children and not others, based on funding availability and implementing partner presence rather than on a systematic assessment of who needs what where. When the project cycle ends, the services end, and the children who were receiving them return to the situation that existed before the project arrived, which is the situation of children in a gap between systems that neither system has been redesigned to close.

The Nigerian government’s responsibility in this situation is not fully dischargeable by pointing to the humanitarian response. The humanitarian response exists precisely because the government’s own systems are not reaching the displaced population. The responsibility to educate Nigerian children belongs to the Nigerian state, not to UNICEF and the JRS and the constellation of international organisations that have been providing education services in displacement settings because the government system cannot. The humanitarian actors understand this. They speak consistently, in their advocacy and in their programme documents, about the need for government systems to absorb and sustain the services they are providing, about the critical importance of handing over to government structures, about durable solutions that outlast the humanitarian presence. What they are less consistent about saying, because they need to maintain working relationships with the governments they are urging to do better, is that the government has been being urged to do better for over a decade and the gap between the urging and the doing has not closed in ways that the children in the camps can feel.

The specific educational needs of displaced children go beyond simply providing a school building and a teacher, and the policy response needs to understand this to be effective. A child who has experienced the violence or the sudden loss that produces displacement is a child whose capacity to learn has been affected by trauma in ways that a standard classroom is not designed to address. Psychosocial support, the kind that helps a child process what happened to her and rebuild the sense of safety and predictability that learning requires, is not a luxury add-on to education programming for displaced children. It is a precondition for the education programming to work. The research on this is clear and it is consistently underfunded in the Nigerian humanitarian response, which prioritises immediate physical needs over the psychological conditions that make addressing those needs sustainable over time.

A displaced child who has been out of school for two years is also not a child who can simply re-enter the grade she left without support. She needs accelerated learning programmes that bring her back to her grade level without requiring her to repeat years she has already lived through, which would extend her time in the educational system and reduce her chances of completing it. She needs documentation support, because many displaced families have lost the records that the formal educational system requires for enrolment and examination registration, and the absence of those records creates bureaucratic barriers that are not insurmountable but are also not being systematically addressed. She needs, in many cases, support in both the language of her home community and the language of the community where she is now displaced, which may not be the same. And she needs the kind of continuity of provision that allows the learning she does in the camp school to be recognised and built upon if she moves again, returns home, or transitions to a permanent location, which requires a national system for recognising and transferring learning credits from humanitarian education settings that does not currently exist in any meaningful form.

None of these needs are being met comprehensively. Some are being met partially, in some camps, by some programmes, for some children. The gap between the partial and the comprehensive is where the majority of displaced children in Nigeria live, and it is a gap that has been documented in every serious assessment of education in displacement in Nigeria for years. The documentation has not produced the comprehensive response. It has produced more documentation, more appeals, more commitments at high-level meetings, and the same gap.

I want to name something about the political economy of the displaced child’s invisibility that the humanitarian conversation rarely names directly. The displaced child is invisible in the education policy conversation in Nigeria for the same reason that the IDP population more broadly has remained in camps for years without an adequate return and relocation programme: because the governance failures that produced the displacement are ongoing, and honestly accounting for the displaced child’s educational situation requires honestly accounting for those governance failures, which is uncomfortable for the governments that produced them and for the international partners who maintain relationships with those governments.

The northeast displacement crisis was produced by an insurgency that the Nigerian government failed to prevent and has failed to resolve. The northwest displacement crisis was produced by a security collapse that the government has managed rather than addressed. The north-central displacement is produced by communal conflicts over land and resources that governance structures have failed to mediate effectively for decades. To say that the displaced child is not in school is to say that the government’s security and governance failures have educational consequences that the education system is not resourced or designed to absorb. That connection is politically uncomfortable. It is also analytically unavoidable and morally necessary.

What would accountability for the displaced child’s education actually look like? It would look like the Ministry of Education having a specific, funded, staffed directorate for education in displacement rather than treating it as an add-on to the humanitarian response. It would look like state governments in Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Zamfara, and Sokoto being required to report annually on the educational status of displaced children in their states, not as a component of the general out-of-school children figure but as a disaggregated category with specific targets and specific consequences for non-achievement. It would look like the Universal Basic Education Commission having a specific allocation for education in displacement that is not subject to the matching grant mechanism that has left billions of naira unaccessed by states that cannot provide counterpart funding, because states in active humanitarian emergency are precisely the states least able to provide counterpart funding.

It would look like a national framework for recognising and transferring learning from humanitarian education settings, so that a child who completes three years of primary school in an IDP camp school has documentation that the formal system will recognise when she leaves the camp. It would look like the psychosocial support that displaced children need being funded as part of the education response rather than as a separate line in the child protection budget that competes for the same inadequate resources. It would look like the government treating the return and relocation of displaced persons as an educational emergency, because every year a family remains in a camp is another year that the educational trajectories of their children diverge further from where they should be.

The girl with the school uniform in the polythene bag is still in the camp. She is still folding her uniform with the care of someone preserving something precious. She is eight years old and she has been watching two years of her primary education pass without her, and the gap that is opening in her foundational learning is a gap that will cost her for the rest of her educational life if it is not closed with the urgency it requires. She is not asking for anything extraordinary. She is asking for the thing that the Nigerian constitution, the Child Rights Act, the Sustainable Development Goals, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, and every policy commitment her country has made in her name have already promised her. A school. A teacher. A chance.

Nigeria cannot keep counting children like her in the aggregate and calling the aggregate a policy response. The displaced child is not a subset of the out-of-school children problem. She is a specific child with a specific history and specific needs and a specific claim on the state that the state has a specific obligation to honour. The claim has been outstanding for years. The obligation has not been met. And the gap between the claim and the meeting of it is measured not in policy documents but in the years of a child’s education that pass in a polythene bag.