WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SAFE SCHOOL INITIATIVE?
By Ameh Abraham
In the quiet farming town of Mussa, Borno State, the headmaster of Central Primary School, Abdu Dunama, has not slept. Not since the morning of May 15, when gunmen stormed his classrooms and walked away with 34 children, most of them nursery pupils aged two to five. “They used them as human shields,” he told the BBC, his voice hollow. “We watched from a hill, helpless.”
One thousand kilometres away in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State, on the same date, the same hour: another coordinated assault. Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Community Grammar School, and L.A. Primary School were raided. At least 39 students and seven teachers were dragged into the bush. Two teachers are dead. Toddlers gone.
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The numbers are staggering: over 80 children and staff in a single day. The echoes are chilling: Chibok, 2014. Dapchi, 2018. A decade later, we are asking the same question, but with a new, bitter addition: What happened to the Safe School Initiative?
Not the slogan. Not the press release. The $30 million. The UN backing. The presidential task force. The promise that never again would a Nigerian child be taken from a classroom.
The Birth of a Promise (2014-2015)
After the world wept with #BringBackOurGirls, Nigeria made a show of resolve. In May 2014, the Global Business Coalition for Education, backed by the UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown, launched the Safe Schools Initiative (SSI).
The goal was simple and audacious: make Nigeria’s schools so secure that no militant could ever again turn a classroom into a kidnapper’s lair.
The funding was unprecedented: over $30 million mobilised from Nigerian businesses (notably Aliko Dangote and the Tony Elumelu Foundation) and international donors. The plan, according to the GBC-Education resource document, included “student transfer programs, school reconstruction, and education strategies within IDP camps.” By late 2015, nearly 50,000 displaced children had reportedly been reached.
Then-President Goodluck Jonathan approved a N7 billion counterpart fund. The SSI was to be a model for the world: a public-private partnership to shield learning from terror.
What went right? For a brief window, schools in Borno and Yobe received fences, guard posts, and emergency communication systems. The federal government established the Safe Schools Coordination Centre in Abuja. On paper, it was a fortress of foresight.
But as the Punch newspaper would note a decade later, “the Safe Schools Initiative exists on paper as school attacks persist.”
The Great Fade (2016-2025)
By 2016, Boko Haram had splintered. ISWAP rose. The insurgency mutated into banditry, and banditry metastasised into a national kidnapping industry. Schools became gold mines.
The SSI did not vanish overnight. It faded. A committee here. A handover there. In 2019, the government relaunched the “National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre” under the Ministry of Police Affairs. In 2022, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) was designated the lead agency. In February 2026, barely three months before the May massacres, the government announced a “Smart School Protection Strategy” with panic buttons, command centres, and a new Department of Safe School Initiative.
Minister of Education Dr. Maruf Olatunji Alausa called school protection a “non-negotiable priority.”
Then came May 15.
Kofo Karunwi, chairperson of the Association of International School Educators in Nigeria, put it bluntly: “More than a decade later, recurring attacks in states such as Borno and Oyo suggest that these standards have remained stronger on paper than in practice.”
Her words land like a hammer. On paper. That is where our children’s safety lives, between the laminated pages of a policy document gathering dust in Abuja.
The Money Question
Let us talk about the money.
We know at least $30 million was raised by the GBC-Education in 2014-2015. We know Nigeria allocated N7 billion in the 2015 budget. We know the World Bank added a $20 million credit line for “safe school” projects in the North-East.
But ask for an audited public account of how those funds were spent after 2018, and you hit a wall. The Safe Schools Initiative was quietly subsumed into broader humanitarian responses. The coordination centre moved from the presidency to the police to the civil defence corps, each transfer a chance for records to blur.
Senator Ali Ndume, representing Borno South, told journalists after the May abductions: “We built fences and guard posts in 2015.” Those fences are now broken. The guards are not paid. The children are gone.”
Meanwhile, the National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS) issued a rare rebuke: “School safety must become a national priority, not merely a reaction after tragic incidents occur.”
But reaction is all we do. After Chibok, we had an inquiry. After Dapchi, we had a pledge. After Oyo and Borno, we have yet another presidential delegation. President Tinubu approved 1,000 forest guards for Oyo State and a “special rescue team.” Forest guards. For schools.
Not panic buttons in every classroom. Not GPS trackers on school buses. Not a national database of abducted students. Not a single, accountable, well-funded, permanent Safe Schools Agency with teeth.
What the Protests Tell Us
On June 2, thousands of teachers, members of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), took to the streets in Lagos, Maiduguri, Uyo, Osun, and the FCT. They carried placards that read: “Our Classrooms Are Not Battlefields” and “Where is Our Safe School Money?”
It was the first nationwide teachers’ protest over abductions. The NUT directed all Oyo State teachers to withdraw services from June 1. A shocking act of defiance, teachers refusing to return to death traps.
One protester in Maiduguri, a mother of three who lost her teaching job when her school closed after an attack, told our correspondent, “They say they spent billions on safe schools. My school has no fence. No toilet. No guard. Where did the money go?”
That is the question that haunts every parent now. Not just what happened, but who accounted for it?
Beyond Paper, Towards Reckoning
The Safe Schools Initiative was never a bad idea. It was a great idea, betrayed by poor implementation, fragmented leadership, and the Nigerian disease of announcing solutions instead of sustaining them.
The Global Business Coalition for Education’s 2015 document optimistically noted: “To date, nearly 50,000 Nigerian children displaced from their homes…have benefited.” That was 2015. Today, according to UNICEF, over 1.4 million children are at risk of dropping out due to insecurity in the North alone.
The gap between 50,000 and 1.4 million is the distance between a promise and a nightmare.
What must happen now?
- A forensic audit of every kobo spent on the Safe Schools Initiative since 2014, published within 90 days.
- A single, permanent National Safe Schools Agency with direct funding, independent oversight, and a mandate to enforce the Minimum Standards for Safe Schools, not just recommend them.
- Mandatory school safety audits for every public and private school in Nigeria, linked to accreditation and funding.
- Community-based school watch programs, forest guards are not enough; parents, teachers, and local hunters must be trained and equipped.
- A national emergency on school abductions, not rhetoric, but a state of emergency that triggers immediate deployment of rapid-response units to every vulnerable school within one week of any attack.
The Christian Association of Nigeria has declared June 12-14 as three days of national mourning. The Senate has observed a minute of silence. CAN is calling for a state of emergency on security.
Silence and mourning are not protection. They are the wages of our collective failure.