Earlier in May, Ministers and education leaders from over 100 countries, including Nigeria, gathered at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London for the Education World Forum, to discuss pedagogy, curriculum reform, and education systems, no doubt with the aim of improving children’s learning outcomes across the world.
Just two days before the forum opened, gunmen stormed schools in two Nigerian states on opposite ends of the country, abducting children and their teachers from their classrooms.
On May 15, armed men on motorcycles attacked three schools in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State, abducting 39 children and seven teachers. One teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was later killed, with footage of the killing later circulated by his captors.
Elsewhere that day, in Borno State, gunmen stormed a primary and junior secondary school in Mussa, Askira-Uba, taking more than 50 children. Most were aged between two and five years old.
As Ministers and “global leaders” gathered in London to discuss the future of education, these children were still in captivity, and two weeks on, they remain unaccounted for.
And this was not an isolated week.
According to Save the Children, since January 2024 there have been at least 10 school kidnapping attacks in Nigeria, affecting more than 670 children.
In November 2025, gunmen abducted 315 students and teachers from St Mary’s School in Papiri, Niger State, the largest mass school abduction since Chibok.
The Government’s response was to close 47 Federal Unity Colleges nationwide and shut all schools in Niger State until 2026. Several other States, including Katsina and Taraba, ordered the closure of all public schools. These closures compounded the harm. Schools are not only places of learning, they are often the only source of structure, safety, and psychosocial support for children.
Closing them removes one of the few stabilising systems available. For a country that already holds the grim distinction of having the highest number of out-of-school children in the world, 18.3 million children according to UNICEF, closing schools escalates the crisis.
This recent attack in Oyo signals that the crisis is no longer confined to historically affected northern regions. What began as ideologically driven abductions by Boko Haram has morphed into a ransom-seeking criminal enterprise, replicating across regions as armed groups copy a model that has proven consistently profitable and consistently unpunished.
When bandits can reach into a nursery school in southwestern Nigeria and take a two-year-old child, the idea that these incidents are isolated no longer holds.
Nigeria is not without a framework for this. In the aftermath of the 2014 Chibok abductions, Nigeria helped shape and subsequently signed the Safe Schools Declaration, an intergovernmental commitment to protect education during armed conflict and insecurity. The Nigeria Safe Schools Initiative was established, backed by donors including the EU, USAID, and UNICEF, with risk assessments, contingency planning, and teacher safety protocols. The issue is not the absence of policy, because the architecture of a solution exists. It is the gap between policy and enforcement, between commitments made and actions taken, and the absence of visible consequences when those commitments fail.
When Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, was asked about the wave of kidnappings on Channels Television in December 2025, he did not speak about children, nor did he speak about policy failure.
He said the attacks had “political undertones,” that people were “trying to embarrass this Government,” and invoked President Tinubu’s name as assurance that the situation would be handled. This was Nigeria’s most senior education official, on national television, responding to mass child abductions by protecting the President’s reputation. The response did not engage with the underlying security or policy failures. Two days after the May 2026 attacks, this same Minister was in London at the Education World Forum, presenting Nigeria’s Renewed Hope Agenda and meeting the Duke of Edinburgh. There is no public record of him addressing the kidnappings.
The problem is not unique to Nigeria. Across conflict-affected regions, the most immediate barrier to learning is not curriculum or pedagogy, but safety. In Ethiopia, over 7 million children are out of school due to conflict. In Sudan, 17.4 million children were displaced from education by the conflict that began in April 2023. According to Save the Children, attacks on schools, teachers and students in conflict zones have tripled in the last five years, despite the Safe Schools Declaration having been in place for over a decade. And where insecurity persists, learning outcomes follow.
Education Cannot Wait estimates that children in conflict-affected countries acquire foundational skills up to six times more slowly than even children in countries affected by natural disasters.
The learning crisis and the security crisis are not separate issues. They are the same issue. I say this as someone who works in education development, who researches learning outcomes, who has sat in rooms not unlike the ones in London. I have to be honest with myself: if a child cannot sit in a classroom without fear of being taken, then the questions I spend my time on, important as they may be, are questions about the second floor of a building that does not have a solid foundation. We are simply debating improvements to systems that, for many children, are not reliably accessible in the first place.
The Education World Forum’s theme this year was peace, planet, purpose, and pathways. Peace was listed first, but peace is not a theme, it is a precondition. It is worth asking what it means to centre peace in global education discussions while children remain in captivity. This is not about a single forum. It is a question about whose reality shapes the global education agenda, and what it will take for the safety of children in classrooms to be treated not as a regional security problem, but as the education crisis it is.
Until children can sit in classrooms without fear, there is no education system to reform. Treating this as anything less than an education crisis is a failure of priority.
By Thelma Obiakor.