Education gives hope, and our goal is to ensure that it is available, accessible, and consistent for children in juvenile centres, thereby breaking the cycle of recidivism.
— Joke Aladesanmi, Executive Director, CELSIR
Somewhere in Nigeria today, a fourteen-year-old is sitting in a remand home, waiting for a court date that keeps not coming. He was a student once, with a school bag, a subject he enjoyed, a teacher whose name he still remembers. Now what he has is time, and nothing constructive to do with it.
Nigeria has an estimated 18.3 million children out of school, a figure that draws international concern. But a smaller population receives almost no attention: children inside Nigeria’s juvenile and correctional centres, for whom school stopped the day they arrived.
Nigeria has roughly 36 to 40 designated juvenile centres; only 15 to 20 remain operational. Of five federal Borstal Training Institutions, only three function: Kaduna (1962), Abeokuta (1984), and Ilorin (2005). Enugu and Kebbi are closed. Most state remand homes, the NCoS Welfare Head confirmed before a federal panel in August 2025, are no longer operational.
Who These Children Are
The mean age of a child in a Nigerian remand home is 11.68 years — a primary school child. In Borstal institutions, reserved for offenders aged 16 to 21, the mean age is 17.27. Critically, 90 percent of remand home children were not admitted for offending; they are classified as needing care and protection, having been abandoned, neglected, abused, or left without family support. Only 3 percent were admitted for an offence such as theft (Atilola et al., 2014). This is not, in the main, a system for young criminals — it is a system for young people already failed before they arrived.
The vulnerability is stark: 96 percent come from seriously dysfunctional families, 70 percent of Borstal inmates from low-income households, and 97 percent show significant psychopathology, including anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation (Atilola et al., 2014).
What Education Looks Like Inside
The right to education for detained children is enshrined in the Child Rights Act (2003) and UN conventions on juveniles. Reality falls severely short.
Where education exists, it is concentrated in the three functional BTIs and Lagos State’s two Special Correctional Centres, which offer primary and junior secondary academics alongside vocational training — tailoring, carpentry, welding, electrical work, agriculture. It is imperfect and underfunded, but it exists.
Lagos tells the most instructive story. Before 2007, its facilities were conventional remand homes with no school and no programme. After Lagos adopted the Child Rights Act in 2007, renaming its facilities Special Correctional Centres, every admitted child was required to attend school or a vocational workshop, with computer classes and a role-model programme bringing back former residents. In October 2024, CELSIR launched a Juvenile Education Programme there, and over 60 percent of beneficiaries secured NOUN admission — evidence of what structured intervention can achieve inside detention.
I was a JSS 2 student. But since I came to the remand home, my education has stopped. Now I do not know what to do.
— Daniel Okon, 18, entered Port Harcourt Remand Home aged 14 (TheCable, 2019)
The contrast elsewhere is painful. In Ibadan, a 2014 study found only 8 percent of detained children accessing any schooling. Port Harcourt children reported no school, no vocational training, and sometimes no reliable food or water. In Benue’s Gboko remand home, a fourteen-year-old said: “We just stay here without going to court, let alone going to school.”
Kaduna BTI, Nigeria’s oldest and largest, operates at 145 percent capacity — about 420 young people in a facility built for 288, degrading every programme. Two geopolitical zones have no functioning federal juvenile facility at all, so young offenders there are held alongside adult criminals — a practice the Child Rights Act condemns but which continues for lack of alternatives.
Why Education Cannot Be Optional
Three arguments stand out. First, recidivism: children released without education or skills return to the circumstances that led to custody, and the cycle continues. Structured intervention reduces reoffending — Lagos’s 60 percent NOUN admission rate proves this domestically.
Second, child rights: a child does not forfeit the right to education by entering a juvenile centre. This is Nigerian law and basic child welfare. A child who enters at eleven and leaves at fourteen having learned nothing has been failed twice — first by circumstance, then by the state.
Third, national interest: these children encountered circumstance before opportunity. Investing in their education during detention is one of the most cost-effective interventions a government can make in its own future.
Civil society has proven intervention works within a broken system, but it cannot substitute for what the government owes these children. Every child inside a juvenile centre deserves a classroom — because the evidence says it works, the law says it is their right, and Nigeria’s future depends on its most vulnerable young people today.
Article Credit: Cecilia Adaja (PhD)
© Published by the Centre for Policy, Research and Growth (CPRG), Global Educators Tribe (GET). www.globaleducatorstribe.org
Key Sources: Atilola et al., PMC/NCBI (2014); CELSIR Juvenile Education Programme (2024–2025); NCoS Welfare Head Dabit, Al-Jazirah News (2025); TheCable (2019); Daily Trust (2025); Child Rights Act 2003; UNODC Borstal Study Report; WJARR (2024).
#JuvenileJustice #EducationEquity #CPRG #GlobalEducatorsTribe
