By Laolu Harolds
He said the figure is based on a national personnel audit of public and private schools in Nigeria conducted in 2018.
The executive secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC, Dr Hammid Bobboyi, had declared in 2018 that a Demographic Health Survey conducted in 2015 put the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria at 13.2 million.
But speaking at a conference in Abuja Adamu said the audit was part of the 2018/2019 Annual School Census, jointly carried out by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), National Population Commission (NPC), National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and other stakeholders.
Records at the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) still estimate Nigeria’s out-of-school children to be 10.5 million since 2010, with about 60 per cent of them in Northern Nigeria.
The minister said it became necessary to clarify on the actual figure based on current data as generated through the latest school census.
The minister who was represented at the event by the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Sonny Echono, said the census showed that the states with the most out-of-school children were Kano, Akwa Ibom, Katsina, Kaduna, Taraba, Sokoto, Yobe, Zamfara, Oyo, Benue, Jigawa and Ebonyi states.
