Key Points

• Northwest school attacks continue to endanger students.

• Northwest school attacks demand urgent government action.

• Northwest school attacks highlight fragile security systems.

Save the Children spoke out against the kidnapping of 23 female students from a secondary school in Kebbi State on Wednesday. They said the attack shows how deeply insecurity has damaged education in Nigeria’s northwest.

Gunmen broke into the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga before dawn on November 17. They killed one staff member and hurt another before taking the girls to an unknown place.

The group said that the event was a painful reminder of a region where armed groups have repeatedly attacked schools for almost ten years, forcing many children, especially girls, out of school and disrupting their education.

The school safety crisis is getting worse in the northwest

Save the Children said the attack in Kebbi shows how unsafe schoolchildren are in the northwest, where repeated raids have made national and international promises to protect the right to education less reliable. Duncan Harvey, the group’s Nigeria country director, said the attack shows once again that children are not safe even after years of promises.

Harvey told federal and state officials to act quickly to free the kidnapped girls and put in place stronger safety measures to protect schools in areas that are at high risk. To lower the chances of future attacks, the group called for better early-warning systems, community-led protection structures, and quick response systems.

Save the Children said that the crisis shows how Nigeria’s National Policy on Safety, Security, and Violence-Free Schools and the Minimum Standards for Safe Schools are not being followed properly. The group said that these frameworks still don’t work in many northern states where security is still a big problem.

The group also said that long-term solutions need to deal with poverty, unemployment, and weak governance, which are all things that make schools unstable.

There haven’t been as many large-scale school attacks in the past few years, but the Kebbi incident is the first major mass kidnapping since March 2024, when more than 200 students were taken from Kuriga in Kaduna State.

Save the Children’s report on Education Under Attack in Nigeria says that between February 2014 and December 2022, there were at least 70 attacks on schools. Of those, 49 happened in the northwest.

The number of school attacks in the northwest is going up

The group said that those attacks led to the kidnapping of 1,683 students, the deaths of 184 students, and the destruction of 25 school buildings. It said that the pattern could get worse if there aren’t stronger protections and the government doesn’t keep its promise.

Save the Children said, “Education is not a privilege; it is a basic right.” “No child should have to die to get an education.”