Adamawa and Bauchi have pledged to strengthen and fund policies aimed at returning married and pregnant girls to school, as part of efforts to tackle child marriage and keep more adolescent girls in education.
The commitments were made at a side session of the Gender and Inclusion Summit 2026 (GS-26), organised by Malala Fund and the Policy Innovation Centre (PIC), with the theme, ‘Education Ends Child Marriage: From Evidence to Action in Nigeria’s Northwest and Northeast.’
Speaking at the session, Adamawa State Commissioner for Education, Hon. Dr Umar Garba Pella, said the state government would make the re-entry guideline for married and pregnant girls a key component of its 2027 appropriation to ensure its sustainability.
‘We are at a point where we must be deliberate about girls, especially adolescent girls,’ Pella said.
He said the government was conscious that development partners operate within defined project cycles, stressing that the government must take ownership of policies and programmes initiated with external support.
‘Whatever we are doing with partners, we are conscious of the fact that every partner is only running a project cycle. And whatever it does, it will finish. The only one that is permanent is government,’ he said.
Pella said Adamawa would therefore make the re-entry guideline ‘central or key’ in the 2027 budget, describing funding as essential to sustaining the policy.
He also stressed that marriage or pregnancy should not permanently end a girl’s education.
‘We are not against marriage… marriage should not stop you, stop school. It shouldn’t be a threat to going to school,’ he said.
The commissioner called for stronger sensitisation involving religious organisations, traditional rulers and communities to address social and cultural barriers preventing married and pregnant girls from returning to school.
In Bauchi State, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, Ibrahim Ahmed, who represented the commissioner, said the state government would publicly launch its gender-responsive education policy and re-entry guidelines before the end of September 2026.
‘Before the end of September this year, we are going to have the public launch,’ Ahmed said.
He said the commitment was part of the state government’s broader response to the out-of-school challenge, noting that the governor had declared a state of emergency in education partly because of the number of children out of school, including married women, pregnant women and adolescent girls.
Ahmed said Bauchi would also intensify community-level engagement and tracking of adolescent girls using an approach similar to the system employed during immunisation exercises.
Under the approach, ward and village heads would compile lists of adolescent girls, while school principals and alternative learning centres would maintain enrolment records to enable officials to reconcile the figures.
‘By that, we will be able to identify those numbers of out-of-school children. This will give us accurate data on that,’ he said.
The commitments by the two states came against the backdrop of concerns over the link between education and child marriage.
In her welcome remarks, Malala Fund representative Nabila said one in three young women in Nigeria was married before the age of 18, with the proportion approaching one in two in parts of the Northeast and Northwest.
She cited the latest Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey as showing that the median age at first marriage was 16.6 years among women with no education, compared with 21.7 years among women with secondary education.
Nabila said new research suggested that child marriage could decline by as much as two-thirds if every girl completed secondary school.
She noted that Nigeria already had frameworks, including the National Strategy and Costed Action Plan on Ending Child Marriage, the Child Rights Act and the National Re-entry School Guidelines, but stressed that implementation remained the major challenge.
‘The question is no longer whether we have good policies. It is whether these policies are actually reaching girls,’ she said.
She added that research estimated child marriage costs Nigeria nearly $10 billion annually through its impact on health, education and women’s earnings, while reducing the likelihood of completing secondary or higher education by about 23 per cent.
In her goodwill remarks, the First Lady of Kwara State and Chairperson of the Nigeria Governors’ Spouses Forum, H.E. Amb. Prof. Olufolake Abdulrazaq, said investment in girls’ education was an investment in the country’s future.
‘When we invest in a girl’s education, we are investing in her agency, her economic potential, her ability to make informed choices, and ultimately, in the strength and prosperity of our communities and our nation,’ she said.
Abdulrazaq said policies providing pathways for married and pregnant girls to return to education were essential, but stressed that their value depended on implementation.
‘Policies that provide pathways for married and pregnant girls to return to education are essential but their real value lies in their implementation,’ she said.
She said the Nigeria Governors’ Spouses Forum had advocated the domestication of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act and Child Rights Act, while supporting interventions around school needs, nutrition for mothers and children, menstrual hygiene, life skills and digital literacy.
She added that the forum had also continued advocacy against sexual and gender-based violence, child labour and child marriage.
Meanwhile, Kano State Technical Adviser to the Governor on Education, Tajuddeen Ahmed, who represented the Commissioner, said the state had already begun implementing its re-entry guidelines and gender-responsive education budgeting framework.
He recalled that girls participated in the July launch of the guidelines, after which the Commissioner directed officials to identify communities where schools were needed to enable girls to return to education.
According to him, partners subsequently identified locations and worked towards establishing and resourcing schools.
Ahmed said the Executive Secretary of the state’s education agency later visited one of the communities and, within about 48 hours, obtained the names of 104 married girls who had dropped out of school but wanted to return.
He said subsequent planning focused on providing teachers, teaching materials and other resources required to support their return.
He also highlighted the scale of the education challenge in Kano, noting that although the state had about 4.7 million primary school pupils, 52 per cent of whom were girls, the number dropped sharply to about 516,000 at junior secondary level and 480,000 at senior secondary level.
He attributed part of the decline to inadequate classrooms and schools, particularly beyond primary education and in communities where girls face greater barriers to accessing secondary schools.
Senior Programme Officer, ACE Charity, Dr Hassana Shuaibu, said her organisation supported the development of re-entry guidelines in Kano and Adamawa by first listening to the girls and other stakeholders affected by the problem.
She said consultations involved girls, husbands, school heads, teachers and community leaders, allowing the guidelines to address realities that were often missed in policy design.
In Kano, she said some girls seeking to return to formal education found alternative learning centres inadequate because they wanted to study subjects such as biology, chemistry and physics. She added that some girls also did not identify with facilities referred to as ‘women centres.’
In Adamawa, Shuaibu said married and pregnant girls were technically allowed to return to school, but the process was largely unstructured and depended heavily on individual school heads.
She said the policy domestication workshops therefore provided an opportunity to adapt the national guidelines to state realities, with girls participating directly in the process.
‘Once they listened to the girls, that was the game changer,’ she said.
Shuaibu warned, however, that launching the policies was only the beginning, stressing that implementation must ultimately translate into actual opportunities for girls to return to school.
The Team Leader, Centre for Girls Education, Habiba Mohammed, said safe spaces and life-skills education were critical to keeping girls in school.
She said her organisation trains mentors and works with community and religious leaders as well as role-model mothers to support girls, while addressing issues including self-esteem, rights, menstruation, marriage and education.
‘We encourage girls to go to school and complete at least 12 years of schooling. When girls are able to do that, issues of early marriage will never come up, because by the time a girl is completing secondary education, at least she’s 18,’ Mohammed said.
She clarified that the programme did not seek to prevent girls from marrying but to ensure they were empowered to make informed decisions about when to marry and were adequately prepared for adulthood.
Executive Director, Education as a Vaccine, Toyin Chukwudile, said a Joint Action Grant covering Bauchi, Adamawa, Kano, Kaduna and Borno states was designed to bring different organisations together around a common strategy.
‘What makes this model really good and I think worthy of replication, is the fact that it’s not about just fragmented investments,’ she said.
Chukwudile added: ‘It’s not one organization that can do all of that.’
She described the approach as ‘an investment in a joint strategy,’ stressing that addressing barriers to girls’ education required coordinated action among government and development partners.
Sharing her personal experience, 17-year-old Rachel Emmanuel Ose, an adolescent mother and advocate from Kaduna State, said she became pregnant at 14 while in Senior Secondary School One in February 2021 and was forced to leave school because pregnant girls were not allowed to continue their education.
She said she faced mockery and stigma before receiving support from PACE Initiative after giving birth. Following training on her rights and encouragement to return to school, she secured her family’s consent and enrolled in a nearby government school at SS2.
Ose, who aspires to become a nurse, called on education authorities to establish dedicated learning arrangements for adolescent mothers and provide childcare facilities to enable them to attend classes without being separated from their babies.
‘I would love the Ministry of Education, the Commissioner, to please create schools for just adolescent mothers, where we can come with our baby, even if they provide for us a facility that will keep our baby, so we don’t worry about that, all is just to go and attend our class, come back, carry our baby,’ she said.