FEATURE… “My Name is Fatima Ali, but I can’t spell it”: Children in Adamawa IDP camps face education crisis

Fourteen years after Boko Haram’s insurgency emptied Gwoza, Mubi, Michika and Madagali, thousands of displaced children in Adamawa remain locked out of classrooms, growing into their teenage years without ever finishing a single grade of school. Government and donor programmes report tens of thousands of children “returned to learning” but inside these displacement camps where the crisis is most visible, families describe a different, unrecorded reality. Bankole Taiwo James reports

YOLA, Nigeria —Aishat Umaru’s hands never stop moving. She loops the thread through the cloth, folds, presses, and stitches again. It is the same motion she has repeated for about two to three weeks at a stretch, until a single embroidered cap is ready to sell. When it is done, someone from outside the camp, because nobody inside the displacement camp can afford one, will pay her somewhere between seven and ten thousand naira for it. She is 15 years old, and she has been making caps since she stopped being a schoolgirl, or rather, since she never really became one.

“I have never been to school in my life, I started at some point and then I stopped going to school when I was in Primary 2.” Aishat says.

Aishat can hardly remember how long she has been living inside the Damare displacement camp, even her mother‘s account was inconsistent. For as long as she can reliably say, Aishat has lived in an internally displaced persons’ camp in Adamawa State for 11 years, ever since her family fled Boko Haram’s assault on Gwoza, in neighboring Borno State. She does not remember the year they ran. She only remembers that it has been long enough for her childhood to pass entirely inside a camp, and long enough for the ambition she once carried of becoming a governor to feel, by her own admission, now out of reach. What Aishat knows with total certainty is that she has never finished a single grade of school. She reached Primary 2 and stopped, because the money for fees ran out, and she has not been back to classroom since then.

 

 

“I feel bad about not going to school. It pains me that people are going to school and I am not going. I really want to go to school. But now, I am fifteen years old, I don’t think I can fit in again.”

Aishat’s story is not an unfamiliar crisis in Adamawa. It is closer to the norm. Fourteen years after the height of the Boko Haram insurgency scattered millions of people across Nigeria’s northeast, the emergency that drove families like hers from their homes has faded from international headlines. But a quieter, slower-moving crisis has settled in behind it: an entire generation of displaced children growing up without ever sitting in a classroom, or sitting in one only long enough to be pulled back out.

A Crisis Measured in Two Ways

The United Nations Children’s Fund estimate that roughly 69 percent of school-age children living in displacement camps across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe — the three states hardest hit by the insurgency, had no access to any form of schooling as of 2025. A separate assessment published, put the number of out-of-school children across the same three states at close to two million, with 56 percent of displaced children not attending school at all. Early this year, Save the Children Nigeria in January said that 28 million Nigerian children and adolescents now lack access to either formal schooling or digital learning — a figure the charity described as a crisis of “great magnitude.”

However, Nigeria’s Universal Basic Education Act already guarantees nine years of free, compulsory schooling. On the policy paper, no child in Adamawa should be out of school for want of money. However, in practice, the state remains one of the epicenters of the country’s out-of-school children crisis — a crisis so vast that Adamawa state officials themselves struggle to agree on its exact size, which is itself part of the problem.

Adamawa’s education authorities do not dispute these numbers. What they dispute is the idea that nothing is being done about them. In January, the state’s Commissioner for Education and Human Capital Development,  Dr  Umar Garba Pella, told the state’s 21 local government chairmen that enrollment drives had to be led from the ground up, insisting that free and compulsory education “is the right of every child in Adamawa State.” Months earlier, the Adamawa State Universal Basic Education Board (ADSUBEB), had wrapped up a Global Partnership for Education-funded programme that officials say pulled more than 12,000 out-of-school children into non-formal learning centers— nearly double its 7,000 targets.

UNICEF, at a separate 2025 review meeting in Yola, said 20,300 Adamawa children had benefited from a foundational literacy method called Teaching at the Right Level, and that an Accelerated Basic Education Programme had returned 12,000 children to learning, with more than 60 percent of them later absorbed into formal schools.

These numbers on paper, looks like a genuine gain. But set them next to the reality in Damare, Fombina IDP camp, and something does not add up. The statistics obscure something the interviews for this story kept surfacing: enrolment, when it happens at all, is only the first of many points at which displaced children fall out of the system — and for many families in Adamawa’s IDP camps, it never happens in the first place.

“Ever since we came to this camp, we have never received help or support from the government or other organization or from other people. It never happened.” says Rukayat Umaru, mother of Aishat

What Gwoza left behind

To understand why Damare IDP camp exists at all, it helps to hear Rukayat Umaru describe the day her family left Gwoza.

Rukayat is 35 years old and the mother of six children, including Aishat, none of whom she describes as safe from the memory of how they came to be displaced. When she speaks of the day Boko Haram fighters attacked their home in Gwoza, she speaks with care and precision of someone who has told the story before, out of necessity rather than choice.

“It was on a Tuesday when they started shooting and killing people. They captured us and they slaughtered some of us in our own eyes. We spent three weeks with the Boko Haram in their captivity.”

When soldiers eventually created an opening for escape, Rukayat’s family fled — first to Madagali, then Shuwa, then, as Boko Haram’s reach extended into Mubi, onward again to Huba, and finally to Yola, the Adamawa State capital. They arrived in 2014. Rukayat has now spent 11 years in the same displacement camp, raising six daughters, that includes Aishat, who has never attended school in her life.

“We came here around 2014. That makes it, by now, eleven years.” Says Rukayat

The camp they arrived at, established on 24 August 2014 on the grounds of the NYSC orientation center in Damare, was never meant to be permanent. By late 2016, with the camp’s population said to have fallen from around 60,000 to under 19,000 as the military reported gains against the insurgency, Adamawa’s then deputy governor said every IDP camp in the state would close by the end of January 2017, with residents resettled in their home communities.

However, that did not happen. Rukayat Umaru’s eldest daughter, Aishat, was three years old when the family fled Gwoza. She is fifteen now, and she has stopped being a schoolgirl, or rather, she never really became one.

“I really have the intention of putting her into school, but because of the financial issue, I see that I cannot take it further because of the lack of money.” that, after the one attempt she did make: a single school year, paid for in two terms, they ran out of money in the third, she says.

But there is a deeper second reason, one that has nothing to do with fees. The reasons Rukayat gives for keeping Aishat and the rest of her daughters out of school are not only financial, though money is part of it. They are also about a fear that never fully lifted, even after the family reached what was supposed to be safety.

“The reason I didn’t put her in school is because I have a feeling like we are not safe. I feel like if I put her in school, Boko Haram will come and attack us… I’m thinking that we might run away from this place again.” Rukayat says.

More than a decade after her family fled, the fear of the group that displaced them still shapes the smallest daily decisions — including whether her child should walk to a classroom. Aisha on the other hand lists, without hesitation, the names of five of her friends who go to school each morning while she stays in the camp: Halima, Aisha, Zainab, Habiba, Jamila.

“It really makes me sad to see that all my friends are going to school and I’m not going. I want to be educated so that I can become a governor because I want to help my people.” Aishat says

The weight of being too old

Rukayat’s account illustrates how fear and money contribute to keep a child out of school from the start, in Fombina IDP camp, Fatima’s mother, Abu Ali, describes a different and less visible barrier — one that emerges only after years of exclusion have already passed.

Abu Ali, did not decide against her daughter’s education so much as watch it become impossible, piece by piece. The family’s income has never stretched to cover school fees for eight children. But there is a second layer to Fatima’s case that also has nothing to do with money—by the time the family had settled enough to consider enrolling her into school, she had already aged out of what her mother considers a bearable starting point.

“She is feeling too big to go and join the primary school. If you go there, you will just see very little children. It’s very shameful to go inside them and learn…”

 

She does not think her daughter is wrong to feel that way. Instead, Abu Ali taught her daughter what she herself knows: how to stitch a cap, as something to occupy a child who would otherwise sit idle all day. It has since become the household’s contingency plan. Abu Ali does not describe Fatimah’s return to school as realistic, she rather talks about capital for a small business, perhaps selling second-hand clothes, and candid that she is wary of marriage for Fatima before she is settled.

“What I plan for her is not about her to get married now. I want her to do a business… I’m afraid that if she starts school now, she will not do it — she will leave it. So, it’s best for me to plan for her to do business like resell second-hand clothes in the market,” says Abu Ali

It is a plan built, in other words, around the assumption that school is no longer an option for her daughter. Not a judgment on her daughter’s ability, but an acknowledgment of how far behind eleven lost years have left her—an assumption her daughter does not fully share, even now.

“Honestly, I regret not going to school. I regret because I see my friends… they know some things and I don’t know. My name is Fatima Ali, but wallahi, I don’t know how to spell it. But now, if I see the opportunity to go to school, I will go,” says Fatimah

Enrolment is not the finish line

In an interview Riki Siman, co-founder and chief operating officer of Tent to School Education Initiative who has spent years walking into internally displaced camps like Damare, has watched this pattern repeat itself across Adamawa’s camps and host communities for years. He argues that the clearest sign of the crisis is not an absent school building, but an adolescent standing near one who cannot read a simple sentence.

“That tells you that displacement has not just interrupted education, it has created years of learning loss. The classroom may be physically close, but education is still very far away,” says Siman

The gap between proximity and access, is what Siman argues government data consistently misses.

“What government statistics often fail to capture is that enrolment does not always mean attendance, attendance does not always mean learning, and learning does not always mean progression. A child can be officially enrolled and still be left behind,” he said

He further explains that the reasons children stay out of school in the first place rarely come down to a single cause. Poverty sits at the center, but it drags a chain of smaller costs behind it uniforms, exercise books, transport, food — any one of which can be enough to keep a child home.

“When a family is deciding between feeding their children today and keeping them in school tomorrow, education becomes difficult to sustain. The issue is often not that parents do not value education. Many do. The problem is that survival comes first.”—like the one that ended Aishat’s brief enrollment into a permanent exit. Dropout, in Siman experience, is rarely one decision.

“It is usually a process. The child slowly disconnects from attendance, learning and confidence before eventually leaving the system.”

What happens to the ones who eventually get pulled out of the system entirely worries him the most. Lost time is not just about missing academic years. It affects confidence, identity and future opportunities. The longer a child stays out of school, the harder reintegration becomes. For girls in particular, prolonged exclusion raises the likelihood of early marriage, gender-based violence, domestic labour and early pregnancy; for boys, it raises the risk of child labour and exploitation.

“Education is not just a development intervention. It is also a protection intervention”, says Siman

What is Working and What is Not

At Malkhohi campalso in Yola, families displaced from Borno say their situation has moved backward, not forward. Aid groups there began withdrawing through 2025, several dependent on United States government funding that was suspended that year. By the end of 2025, no aid organization remained on site — a reversal that touched not only food and healthcare but the education support UNICEF had provided to children orphaned by the insurgency. Camp leaders say they have written repeatedly to state authorities about deteriorating conditions without receiving a response.

However, not every intervention in Adamawa has failed to reach its target. Where formal aid has receded, smaller, community-rooted efforts have tried to fill the space. At the EkklesiyarYan’uwa IDP camp in Wurro-Jabbe and at Malkhohi, a volunteer-led chess initiative funded initially through small personal donations has drawn displaced children back toward structured learning, moving some out of informal camp classrooms and into formal schools in Yola, with donated uniforms and books covering costs families could not. At Salama camp, home to families from Madagali for roughly a decade, Jesuit Refugee Service Nigeria brought the camp’s small volunteer-run primary school its first real supply of exercise books and teaching aids — a school that, its head teacher Luka Yalhuma says, began with just three volunteers trying to give displaced children some form of basic schooling.

Also, in Fombina IDP camp, a missionary couple set up a school called Lyntos Academy, a school Okaga and his wife, Linda, built from almost nothing in a region where almost nothing comes. From a single teacher and fewer than ten pupils, Lyntos Academy has grown into an operation with 23 staff members and roughly 300 students. About more than 70 of them are displaced children from neighboring Borno State.

These interventions matter, and families in the camps they reach describe real improvement. But they remain small, meanwhile, the headline figures keep accumulating.

Siman argues these community-rooted models point to what should come next, and warns against the alternative: treating enrolment numbers as an endpoint rather than a starting line.

“We need to move from designing education around the system to designing learning around the child,” he says.

The MalalaFund announced partnering with a Nigerian organization, ACE Charity, on a project working in Kano and Adamawa states to secure the domestication and funding of national guidelines allowing married adolescents and adolescent mothers to re-enter school — recognizing that many girls who marry young are otherwise permanently written out of enrolment statistics altogether.

None of these programmes are lies. Somewhere in Adamawa, tens of thousands of children genuinely have been returned to a classroom because of them. But somewhere else in the same state, a mother who has raised eight children inside one camp for more than a decade says help has “never” arrived — and no dataset exists to reconcile the two claims, no tracking system that follows an individual child from enrolment through however many years it takes her to either finish school or quietly disappear from it.

Eleven years, and counting

Back in Fombina IDP camp, Fatima Ali is still stitching and sets the cap down for a moment. Asked what she imagines for the years ahead, her response was swift. She wants to get her parents out of this camp, go back home to Gwoza, leave the cap-making behind if she ever gets the chance to trade it for a desk and a book back at home in Gwoza.

 

However, she understands how unlikely that will happen, when at seventeen, with no record of ever completing a grade, she has already priced herself out of the version of school her country promised her — a free and compulsory education, by law, for every child in Adamawa. Whether it still can is, at this point, not really a question for Fatima to answer by herself.

This article was produced as part of the Liberalist Centre’s Journalism for Liberty Fellowship, with funding from Liberty International.