The Nigerian Child and the Cost of Survival

The Nigerian Child and the Cost of Survival

By Akudiang Comfort

Every morning, millions of Nigerian parents wake up to the same difficult calculation: what can the family afford today, and what must wait until tomorrow?

For a low-income family, the decision can be painfully simple. School expenses are due, food prices have risen, a child needs medication, and transport costs continue to consume a larger share of household income. There is often no easy answer. Someone must wait.

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Imagine a mother standing at a market stall with a limited amount of money in her hand, calculating whether to buy enough food for the evening or keep the money for her child’s school expenses. At home, another child may be complaining of fever, but a visit to the hospital means paying for consultation, drugs, and transportation. These are not merely economic choices. They are choices that can shape a child’s education, health, nutrition, and future.

This is the uncomfortable reality behind Nigeria’s cost-of-living crisis: when household incomes fail to keep pace with the cost of basic necessities, children often pay the highest price.

Nigeria has about 98 million children and adolescents below the age of 18, according to UNICEF’s 2025 Annual Report. Nearly one in two Nigerians is below 18, making decisions about public investment in children’s decisions that affect almost half of the country’s population.

The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether Nigerian families can survive the current economic pressure. It is whether the country is doing enough to ensure that children do not become the unintended victims of that struggle.

For a child, hunger is not just hunger. It can mean arriving at school unable to concentrate. Lack of healthcare is not merely a family financial problem; it can turn a treatable illness into a serious setback. Missing school because parents cannot afford fees, uniforms, books, or transportation can gradually narrow a child’s opportunities.

UNICEF’s 2025 Annual Report says 54 percent of children aged 0–17 in Nigeria live in multidimensional poverty, meaning they experience deprivation in areas such as education, health, nutrition, water, sanitation, and other essential services.

The education crisis tells another part of the story. UNICEF’s September 2026 report on public finance for basic education says 10.2 million primary-school-age children and 8.1 million junior-secondary-school-age children were out of school in 2018. The figures are therefore historical, but they reveal the scale of a problem Nigeria has struggled to resolve.

Even for children who are in school, attendance does not always translate into learning. UNICEF reports that in 2022, 49 percent of Primary 3 learners, 67 percent of Primary 5 learners and 86 percent of Junior Secondary 2 learners did not reach minimum proficiency in mathematics.

Behind every percentage is a child sitting in a classroom, a parent paying what little the family can afford, and a teacher attempting to work within a system that itself requires greater investment.

This is why public financing matters.

UNICEF’s analysis shows that education expenditure as a share of total government spending declined from 9.3 per cent in 2015 to 3.6 per cent in 2023, well below the international benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent.

The Federal Government has, however, increased its stated commitment to education and healthcare in the 2026 budget. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2026 Budget Speech proposed ₦3.52 trillion for education and ₦2.48 trillion for health, alongside other interventions aimed at human capital development. The President also said more than 788,000 students had been supported through the Nigerian Education Loan Fund in partnership with 229 tertiary institutions.

These commitments are important. But budgets must ultimately be judged not only by the size of the figures announced but also by what those figures deliver in the lives of ordinary Nigerians.

Can a poor child remain in school because support reached the family at the right time? Can a mother take her sick child to a functional health facility without having to choose between medicine and food? Can a child go to school adequately nourished enough to learn?

These are the questions that should sit at the centre of Nigeria’s development conversation.

The challenge is particularly significant in states such as Plateau, where families in urban and rural communities face the same pressures of food, education, healthcare, and transportation costs. Plateau can serve as a window into the wider national problem: a child growing up in a low-income household does not experience inflation through economic statistics but through smaller meals, delayed medical treatment, unpaid school expenses, and the daily struggle to meet basic needs.

Government efforts at the federal and state levels must therefore be matched with stronger accountability for resources meant for children. Education, healthcare, nutrition, water, and social protection should not be treated as competing priorities. For the child, they are interconnected parts of survival and development.

There is also a need to strengthen social protection for vulnerable households, improve basic healthcare, expand access to quality public education, and ensure that education budgets translate into classrooms, teachers, learning materials, and measurable improvements in learning outcomes.

The private sector, civil society, communities, and development partners also have roles to play. But the primary responsibility for guaranteeing children’s basic rights remains with the state.

The cost of failing to invest in children is rarely visible in a single budget year. It appears later in unemployment, poor health, low productivity, insecurity, inequality, and lost opportunities.

That is the hidden bill Nigeria cannot afford to ignore.

The Nigerian child should not have to compete with food prices, medical bills, and household poverty simply to exercise the basic right to learn, eat well, and receive healthcare.

The question is not simply who pays for today’s Nigerian child. The more important question is, what will Nigeria have to pay tomorrow if it fails to invest in that child today?