The Abia state government said it would begin a “hunt” for children who are usually not in school during school hours.
Goodluck Ubochi, the state commissioner for basic and secondary education, said Abia’s education marshals will commence the hunt on March 1, 2025.
Ubochi spoke on Tuesday during a press conference ahead of the Abia schools transformation programme launching on February 26.
He said pupils not found in school during school hours would be arrested and used to apprehend their parents who would be punished.
The government, he said, would enforce school attendance by pupils because it has invested in giving them a better education.
Ubochi said that a planned transformation of Abia schools through innovation would begin with 221 out of the state’s 1,600 schools.
“We have marked out 221 schools, 10 primary schools and five secondary schools from each of the 17 local government areas,” he said.
One in every three Nigerian children is estimated to be out of school, including 10.2 million at the primary level and 8.1 million at the junior secondary level according to UNICEF data.
Recent data from UNESCO puts Nigeria’s out-of-school children rate at 28 million, 19.5 million in rural and 8.5 million in urban areas.
Faced with such grim statistics, many states in Nigeria have been scrambling to address their quota of out-of-school children.
In 2022, Nigeria’s multidimensional poverty index showed that 5.6 per cent of children aged between 6 and 15 are out of school in Abia.
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In January 2025, Abia began free and compulsory education for children up to the junior secondary school level.
This initiative, the state said, is to align with the Abia State Child Rights Law of 2006, which mandates compulsory basic education.
To enforce it, the government empowered a set of “education marshals” to identify and address truancy among school-aged children.
Additionally, the state said it has allocated 20 per cent of the 2025 budget to the education sector.
