Appraising Uba Sani’s Bold Rescue of Kaduna’s Out-of-School Children

Abdulkareem Kubau

The truest measure of an education policy is not the elegance of its declarations, but the number of children whose lives it changes. In Kaduna State, Governor Uba Sani has steadily moved education reform from aspiration to measurable action, confronting one of the gravest threats to the state’s future: the exclusion of children from school. His administration has treated the out-of-school crisis neither as an inherited misfortune nor as an insoluble feature of northern Nigeria, but as an emergency demanding money, evidence, competent management and sustained political will.

That seriousness is visible first in the state’s priorities. For three consecutive years, education has received the largest single share of Kaduna’s budget. The sector took 25 per cent in 2024, 26.14 per cent in 2025 and 25 per cent of the N985.9 billion 2026 budget. In a public culture where education is frequently celebrated in speeches but weakened in expenditure, this consistency matters. It has given institutional weight to the administration’s conviction that Kaduna cannot defeat poverty, insecurity, unemployment or social exclusion without first enlarging access to knowledge.

The investment supports a broader architecture of reform. Tuition fees in state-owned tertiary institutions were halved, contributing to an enrolment rise exceeding 200 per cent. The retirement age for teachers moved from 60 to 65, while the state committed to recruiting 2,000 primary school teachers annually. Across the 23 local government areas, thousands of classrooms have been built or renovated and essential facilities, furniture and learning materials provided. School feeding has strengthened retention, while extensive education data capture has improved planning.

Yet the defining strength of the Governor Sani approach is its recognition that improved schools alone cannot solve exclusion. A classroom may exist while the poorest child remains unable to enter it. Tuition may be free while uniforms, books, transport, levies and the loss of a child’s labour place education beyond a family’s means.

In Kaduna’s household mapping, economic constraints accounted for 58.5 per cent of exclusion, and lack of money dominated the reasons given within that category. “Free education” therefore describes a legal entitlement; it does not erase the real price borne by vulnerable households.

This understanding places the Reaching Out-of-School Children Project at the heart of the Governor Sani administration’s education agenda. ROOSC is not a ceremonial programme or isolated donor initiative. It expresses Governor Sani’s determination to find excluded children, understand why each is outside the classroom, remove the barrier and create a pathway into sustained learning. Valued at $62.8 million and operating across all 23 local government areas, the four-year intervention combines state funding with grants and technical support.

Its ambition is substantial. ROOSC aims to enrol 100,000 out-of-school children and benefit 1.2 million learners. It provides for 102 new schools and learning centres, 170 renovations and work on 2,304 classrooms. It will strengthen school-based management committees, train teachers and officers, improve learning outcomes and make schools safer and more inclusive. Civil works have commenced, but the project’s reach extends beyond buildings.

Children who cannot immediately return through conventional schooling are offered flexible routes. Accelerated basic education enables older learners to recover lost years. Integrated Qur’anic and Tsangaya education combines religious instruction with literacy, numeracy and life skills. Catch-up clubs prepare dropouts for re-entry, while radio lessons reach difficult terrain. Vulnerable learners receive materials, girls receive menstrual-health support, and children with disabilities receive assessment and assistive devices. This is reform shaped around the child, not a demand that every child fit one rigid system.

Early results justify the confidence now surrounding ROOSC. More than 26,000 out-of-school children have been enrolled cumulatively, with boys and girls represented in near-equal numbers. Thousands more have been reached through accelerated education, integrated learning, catch-up clubs and radio instruction. Over 1,600 catch-up learners have moved into formal schools, while the first accelerated-learning cohort recorded retention of nearly 85 per cent. Teachers, head teachers and quality-assurance officers have received structured professional development, with recorded competency gains. These are not abstract outputs; they are children restored to possibility and schools acquiring the capacity to keep them there.

The project’s most consequential achievement may be its replacement of estimates with evidence. A statewide enumeration visited 360,319 homes and identified 187,719 out-of-school children aged six to 17, including 106,353 boys and 81,366 girls. Enumerators used digital devices, geofencing and independent checks. The result was a name-and-location map showing where excluded children live and why they are missing school.

That distinction has transformed planning. When the household map is combined with the digital Annual School Census, government can see both sides of the problem: children outside the system and the schools, teachers and classrooms available within it. Kaduna can consequently decide where a new school is essential, where an existing one requires expansion, where teachers are scarce, and where feeding, transport, cash support, community engagement or a flexible calendar will achieve more than another building. Reform becomes precise rather than performative.

The map also dismantles comfortable generalisations. Kaduna North Senatorial Zone carries about half of the identified burden, but exclusion differs sharply among communities. Kubau’s problem is strongly connected to shortages within the education system. In Giwa, farm labour exerts a powerful pull on children. Makarfi requires stronger post-primary and vocational pathways. Soba demands deeper cultural and community engagement, while poverty and displacement weigh heavily in Igabi. A uniform remedy would waste resources; evidence permits the administration to match each barrier with an appropriate response.

Other findings are equally instructive. Nearly two-thirds of excluded children are of primary-school age, proving that intervention must begin at the point of first enrolment. More than 60 per cent have never attended school, while the remainder entered and later dropped out, often during the earliest primary years. These groups require different solutions: mobilisation and first-time access for one, recovery and accelerated re-entry for the other. More than 17,000 children have spent over two years outside education, increasing the urgency of catch-up programmes.

The data has also exposed a gender reversal that policy must not ignore. Boys constitute 56.7 per cent of the identified population, influenced significantly by farming, petty commerce and informal apprenticeships. Protecting girl-child education remains indispensable, but the evidence now requires an equally deliberate boy-child retention strategy. It is precisely this willingness to follow facts rather than stereotypes that gives the Kaduna model its national importance. The federal government’s decision to embrace the household-mapping approach as a framework for wider identification validates a notable subnational innovation: Kaduna is not merely responding to a national crisis; it is helping Nigeria rethink how that crisis should be measured.

The movement from an estimated out-of-school population of about 535,000 at the beginning of the Governor Sani administration to a directly enumerated 187,719 is profoundly encouraging, although the figures arise from different methods and age parameters and should not be treated as a strict statistical comparison.

The responsible conclusion is nevertheless compelling. Kaduna has moved from broad estimates exceeding half a million to a verified register of fewer than 200,000 children, while interventions have returned large numbers to learning. The achievement deserves celebration, but the remaining 187,719 children constitute an obligation, not a footnote.

Behind this machinery is the ROOSC  Project Management Unit coordinated by Mr Ezra Angai. Under his leadership the Project has been a huge success. Angai’s background in banking, development work and public administration equips him for that demanding intersection. Under his stewardship, the unit has translated the governor’s policy direction into implementation, monitoring resources and results across communities while keeping the project centred on measurable outcomes.

His coordination has helped make ROOSC one of the administration’s most persuasive demonstrations of placing capable hands in critical positions. The project’s emerging success belongs to a wider chain of leadership: a governor who established the priority and defended the investment; education institutions that convert policy into service; partners that provide finance and expertise; teachers who animate classrooms; communities that release and support their children; and a management team that holds the parts together. Effective reform is rarely the work of one office, but it always requires leadership able to give many offices a common purpose.

Governor Sani’s education record is ultimately a statement about the kind of Kaduna he seeks to build. Every child returned to school is one life less exposed to illiteracy, exploitation, criminal recruitment, forced marriage and inherited poverty. Every competent teacher retained, classroom restored and meal served strengthens not only an education system but the social foundations of peace. The long-term value of ROOSC will therefore exceed its enrolment figures, because education enlarges productive citizenship and gives vulnerable communities a stake in stability.

The work is unfinished. Insecurity still closes schools and displaces families. Poverty still forces impossible choices. Teacher shortages, infrastructure gaps, early dropout and social resistance remain formidable. But Kaduna now possesses what serious reform requires: political commitment, remarkably improved security conditions across the state, substantial financing, household-level evidence, differentiated interventions and accountable coordination. It has moved beyond lamenting the out-of-school crisis to building an instrument capable of defeating it.

That is the significance of the Sani education story. It is the story of reform graduating into results, of public expenditure acquiring a human face, and of excluded children becoming visible to the state by name, location and need. Through ROOSC, ably coordinated by Ezra Angai, Kaduna has shown that the scourge of out-of-school children is neither inevitable nor beyond remedy. It can be reduced when compassion is organised, resources are protected and policy is governed by evidence.

The most fitting tribute to the Governor Sani administration is therefore found not in rhetoric, but in the growing number of Kaduna children walking back into classrooms; and towards futures once placed beyond their reach.

•Kubau, a freelance journalist, resides in Kurmin Mashi, Kaduna.