Hauwa Ishaya vividly recalled the night in April 2014, when armed men stormed her boarding school in Chibok, abducting her and 275 other schoolgirls, forever changing the course of their lives.
She told CNN how Boko Haram militants arrived at the Chibok Government Secondary School in northeastern Nigeria while the girls were preparing for exams; she was 16 at the time. The men forced the students, aged between 15 and 17, onto trucks bound for their hideout in the vast and dense Sambisa Forest, burning down the school’s examination hall and other buildings before they left.
While 57 girls managed to escape that night, some by jumping off moving vehicles, 219 were taken into captivity. Between 2016 and 2017, more than 100 of them were eventually freed but 82 are still missing, according to figures from Amnesty International.
News of the abductions spread across Nigeria and around the world, with public figures from Michelle Obama to Malala Yousafzai using the hashtag BringBackOurGirls to advocate for the release of the kidnapped students. Over time, the social media movement came to represent not just the call for the release of the girls still in captivity but also a plea for the government of Nigeria to take action on what the movement organizers called “an assault on girl child education especially in the north east.”
Sunday April 14, 2024, will mark 10 years since the infamous abductions. For Ishaya, now 27, the memory remains all too vivid and painful. In late March, she traveled 260 kilometers (about 161 miles) with CNN, back to her old school, hoping to lay the ghosts of her past to rest. Determined to further her education, Ishaya enrolled at the American University of Nigeria in Yola, studying Communication and Multimedia Design.
For northern Nigeria, little has changed. Kidnappings have continued unabated and, as CNN learned, the ongoing violence has cast a long shadow over education – of girls in particular – further limiting the possibilities in a part of the country already marked by vastly higher rates of poverty, illiteracy in girls and child marriage.
Paying with your life to be educated
The name Boko Haram, in Hausa, translates roughly to “Western education is forbidden,” reflecting the Islamist militants’ ideological opposition to secular education, particularly for girls. The abduction of the Chibok girls remains the highest profile example of the group’s targeting of schools, but it represents only a fraction of the attacks on learners and educational institutions carried out.
Between February 2014 and December 2022, according to data from international NGO, Save the Children, raids on schools have persisted across Nigeria (though the vast majority are in the country’s northwest region), with dire consequences for both students and teachers or school workers: at least 1,743 have been kidnapped, nearly 200 killed and 25 buildings schools destroyed.
While boys’ schools have not been spared from the scourge of violence, girls’ education remains particularly vulnerable because girls in this region, who are already lagging behind their peers in other parts of the country, are being directly targeted.
Nigeria school attacks mainly occurred in poorer north
Since the Chibok abductions in April 2014, violence targeting schools in northern Nigeria has intensified. Save the Children has verified at least 69 more incidents between February 2014 and December 2022. Overall, at least 1,680 girls and boys, as well as 60 teachers and school workers, have been kidnapped, and 184 learners and 14 staff killed.
This picture, taken on March 5, 2015, shows an aerial view of the burnt-out classrooms Chibok Government Secondary School, from where Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 teenagers on April 14, 2014. (Sunday Aghaeze/AFP/Getty Images)
Girls’ enrollment in school in northern Nigeria has improved over the last decade, but according to a survey carried out by Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF in 2021, over half of women aged 15-49 in the northeastern and northwestern regions were illiterate with no education, compared to less than 1% in the southeast and 7% in the southwest. In addition, approximately half of girls in the northeast and around 40% in the northwest were not attending primary or lower secondary school, in contrast to less than 10% in the southern states.
These figures are of significance for Nigeria because, as the survey notes, literacy “is often seen as a proxy measure of social progress and economic achievement.” But they also matter for the rest of the continent and beyond. By 2030, Nigeria will have “17% of the children in Africa and 5% of the children in the world,” according to UNICEF. As the UN children’s agency put it: “Nigeria’s child population is large and growing… What happens to children in Nigeria matters significantly to regional and global development.”
“We know that when we educate women, that has a multitude of returns and economic growth,” Executive Director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA), Lisa Chung Bender told CNN. “Educating women is the best return on investment that any country can make. If Nigeria wants to advance… the best investment [is] getting all girls into school and having them stay in school through completion.”
The GCPEA, among other things monitors and works to end impunity for attacks on education. Of the situation in northern Nigeria, Bender noted that attacks have “really intensified.” The prevailing insecurity, she told CNN, erodes families’ trust in sending their children to school.
“When schools are not safe, all aspects of education are at risk, from teacher recruitment to student’s learning outcomes,” Bender explained. “We see some of those effects immediately, such as dropout, failure to enroll, because parents are afraid to send their girls away.”
Choosing to persist with educating girls despite the very real risks can also have a psychological impact on parents, according to Oby Ezekwesili, former Nigerian education minister and one of the leaders of the Bring Back Our Girls movement.
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