Education Minister Tunji Alausa has claimed that the federal government returned more than one million children from the streets to classrooms in the past 30 months through targeted interventions, while challenging widely cited international estimates that placed Nigeria’s out-of-school population at 18.3 million as outdated and no longer reflective of ground realities.
Speaking on Channels Television, Alausa said the government had embarked on a comprehensive state-by-state mapping and geotagging exercise to generate more reliable data, pointing to Kaduna State as an early example where federal verification found approximately 700,000 out-of-school children against the UNICEF estimate of 1.8 million for the same state. He said preliminary findings suggested that once the nationwide exercise was completed, the figure would likely fall below eight million.
The minister defended the government’s decision to exempt College of Education candidates and students seeking admission into non-technology agricultural programmes from the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, arguing that the policy would raise annual tertiary admissions to approximately 1.5 million, nearly double the figure recorded two years ago. He said the exemptions were designed to strengthen teacher supply and food production capacity, two sectors he described as critical to national development.
Alausa also disclosed plans to overhaul agricultural curricula across universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education to incorporate modern farming technologies including greenhouse agriculture, bringing tertiary education in the sector in line with practices that had evolved significantly over the past decade.
