The President of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Leye Kupoluyi, has delivered a data-driven indictment of Nigeria’s education system, saying the country faced not one but four interlocking failures across funding, access, technology integration, and policy alignment, and that the private sector had an obligation to co-invest in closing those gaps rather than waiting for successive budget cycles to produce incremental change.
Kupoluyi, speaking at the chamber’s education conference, said Nigeria hosted one of the largest out-of-school populations on earth, with UNICEF’s 2024 data placing the figure at approximately 18.3 million children, comprising 10.2 million at primary level and 8.1 million at secondary. He said roughly one in five of the world’s out-of-school children was Nigerian, making the problem not just a domestic governance failure but a challenge with global dimensions.
On funding, he said the 2026 federal education budget of N3.52 trillion represented 6.1 percent of total federal spending, well below UNESCO’s 15 to 20 percent benchmark and the 26 percent threshold set in Nigeria’s own National Policy on Education. He noted, however, that the problem was one of political will rather than fiscal capacity, pointing to Enugu State’s allocation of 32.2 percent of its 2026 budget to education, Kano’s commitment of N405.3 billion representing 30 percent, and Jigawa’s N234.5 billion allocation of 26 percent as proof that the recommended benchmarks were achievable within Nigeria’s existing fiscal envelope.
He highlighted broadband penetration reaching 50.58 percent in November 2025 as a positive development but noted the connectivity gap remained concentrated exactly where access was worst, in rural and northern communities, meaning the infrastructure required for digital education was absent in the places education was most needed. He called on the private sector to treat educational co-investment not as philanthropy but as the highest-return investment available to chambers of commerce, because it directly shaped the workforce businesses would hire, the consumers they would sell to, and the economy in which they would operate.
