Out-Of-School Crisis: Varsity Don Wants Financial Incentives For Vulnerable Families

A renowned professor of Law, Bagoni Bukar, has called on governments in Northern Nigeria to introduce sustained financial incentives for vulnerable families.

He said this will encourage parents to enrol their children in school and prevent them from dropping out.

Bukar stated this during an interview with LEADERSHIP.

He said poverty remained a major factor driving children away from classrooms into street trading, begging and menial labour, warning that many families were increasingly finding it difficult to prioritise education over their immediate survival needs.

He said addressing the out-of-school children crisis in Nigeria, particularly in the North, required more than policy pronouncements, stressing the need for targeted financial interventions that would ease the economic burden on poor households.

According to him, years of institutional and socio-economic challenges have eroded the foundations needed to support children’s education, leaving many vulnerable families with limited options.

He said the economic realities facing poor households had made it increasingly difficult for parents to keep their children in school, as some families depended on income from children engaged in street activities to meet their basic needs.

“Today, poverty has pushed many families to a point where survival through hawking, begging and menial labour seems more rewarding than education.

“For a vulnerable household, the immediate income from a child on the street often outweighs the long-term promise of the classroom,” he said.

He called for deliberate, targeted assistance to poor families, particularly those whose economic circumstances made it difficult to meet their children’s educational needs.

“That reality notwithstanding, what is required is sincere, targeted financial support to vulnerable parents and children. If families have a basic safety net, children can spend more time learning, and parents will have less pressure to withdraw them.”

The professor stressed that many children were either not enrolling in school or dropping out because the support available to their families was inadequate and inconsistent.

He therefore urged governments across the North to, where available, move beyond existing interventions and establish sustainable financial assistance programmes that encourage parents to keep their children in school. “The truth is, many children do not enrol or remain in school because support to do so is infrequent and inadequate,” he said.

Bukar said Northern governments needed to take greater responsibility for addressing the economic conditions that continued to keep thousands of children out of formal education.