The generator hums somewhere behind the compound as I pull my notebook out, and already I know today’s visit will not go the way I planned it on paper.
We arrive just after 8 a.m. the hour most Nigerian children are supposed to be settling into their first lesson. Instead, the compound is full of children who are very much awake, very much busy, and nowhere near a classroom. A boy of about seven is stacking firewood taller than he is. Two girls are balancing basins of water on their heads, walking the kind of practiced, unhurried walk that tells you this is routine, not an errand.
I ask one of the mothers, through our field coordinator translating, whether her children go to school. She laughs, not unkindly, but the way you laugh at a question whose answer should be obvious. “School is for when there’s nothing else that needs doing,” she says. Today there is wood to gather and water to fetch. Tomorrow there might be a farm to help on. There is always something else that needs doing.
What the Numbers Never Capture
We have written the statistics before, the millions of Nigerian children out of school, the states carrying the heaviest share of that number. Sitting in this compound, the number stops being an abstraction. It becomes a boy stacking firewood who is clearly bright, clearly curious, and asks our coordinator three questions about the camera before we’ve even set our bags down.
It becomes a mother who is not indifferent to her children’s education, she simply has no version of today where sending them to school doesn’t cost her something she cannot afford to lose: an extra pair of hands, a few more hours, a small margin she’s already stretched thin.
This is the part that’s easy to miss from a distance. Almost nobody here has decided education doesn’t matter. They’ve decided, quietly and repeatedly, that survival comes first, because it has to.
The Small Shift We are Looking For
By early afternoon, we are sitting with a group of parents under a mango tree, talking through what a bursary programme would actually mean for their households not in the abstract, but in hours and naira. Who fetches the water if the child who usually does is in class instead? What does a uniform cost compared to what a child could otherwise earn or save the household that week?
These are the questions that matter more than any national statistic. They are also the questions IA-Foundation tries to sit with before a single form is filled out, because a bursary that doesn’t account for what a family gives up by saying yes isn’t really solving anything.
Before we leave, the boy with the firewood asks if we’re coming back. I tell him we are. He nods, like that settles something, and goes back to stacking.
Why We Keep Showing Up
We do not come away from a day like this with clean answers, and just clearer questions, and a longer list of families we now know by name instead of by statistic. That, more than anything, is the work: showing up enough times that a compound full of children doing everything except sitting in a classroom starts to look less inevitable, and more like something that can actually change.
If you would like to help make that change possible for families like these, visit www.ia-foundation.org tob learn about our bursary programme and upcoming community visits.
