Hauwa was 14 years old when she left school.
It was not a decision she made. It was a decision that was made for her — by poverty, by tradition, by the arithmetic of a family that could afford to educate its sons or its daughters but not both, and by a community that had, over generations, developed an elaborate set of reasons why girls' education could wait, or did not matter, or would eventually be superseded by marriage anyway.

She is 31 years old now. She has three children. She has spent the years between 14 and 31 doing the work that northern Nigerian women do — cooking, cleaning, farming, raising children, managing households on resources that are rarely enough, in communities where the infrastructure for any kind of opportunity is thin at best.
And she is back in school.


The Women Going Back
Hauwa is one of a growing number of women across northern Nigeria who are returning to formal education after years — sometimes decades — away. Al Jazeera's reporting in June 2026 documented this trend across several northern states, where programmes targeting adult female learners are recording significant enrolment increases.

These are not young women taking a gap year. These are mothers, grandmothers, wives — women who left education as girls and are returning as adults, navigating the enormous practical challenges of studying while running households and raising children, in communities where the decision to pursue education is still, for many women, not entirely their own to make.

Their reasons vary. Some are motivated by the desire to read to their children, to supervise homework, to understand the documents they are asked to sign. Some want specific skills — literacy, numeracy, vocational training — that will allow them to earn income and reduce their dependence on husbands or families. Some are driven by something harder to name: a sense of unfinished business, a desire to become the person they might have been if the opportunities had been there.
What they share is determination that is, frankly, humbling.



The Barriers They Face
To understand what these women are doing, you have to understand what they are doing it against.
The cost of childcare.** Women who are mothers cannot simply attend school as if they have no other responsibilities. They need somewhere for their children to go while they study. In communities with limited childcare infrastructure, this is often the first and most immediate barrier. Some programmes have responded by incorporating childcare into their design. Many have not.

The housing question.** Northern Nigeria's housing patterns often mean that adult women learners cannot easily access educational facilities, particularly in conservative communities where women's movement outside the home is restricted or subject to male family members' permission. Distance to school matters. The safety of the route matters. The availability of female-only learning spaces matters.

The cultural negotiation.** Perhaps the most complex barrier is not logistical but social. In many northern Nigerian communities, a woman who decides to return to education is not simply making a personal decision about her own development. She is navigating a web of family expectations, community norms, religious frameworks, and spousal authority. She may need her husband's permission. She may face scepticism from her in-laws. She may encounter community members who question why she is seeking education at this stage of her life, or what she plans to do with it.
The women who navigate these barriers successfully are not just getting an education. They are, in a quiet but real sense, renegotiating the terms of their relationship with their communities.

The financial reality.** Even where education is nominally free, the costs of attending — transportation, materials, sometimes the cost of childcare arrangements — can be prohibitive for women in low-income households. And every hour spent in a classroom is an hour not spent on the household tasks that fall disproportionately on women. The opportunity cost of education, for these women, is higher than it is for men in comparable circumstances.


What the Research Says About Why This Matters
There is an enormous body of research on the relationship between women's education and development outcomes. The findings are consistent across contexts and methodologies.
Educated women have fewer children and invest more in each child's health and education. The intergenerational effect of female education is well-documented: when a mother has more education, her children — particularly her daughters — are more likely to attend and complete school themselves.

Educated women earn more income. When women earn more, household wellbeing improves — because women spend a larger proportion of their income than men on food, health, and education for their children. A dollar of income in a woman's hands has a different multiplier effect from a dollar in a man's hands, because of how women prioritise household spending.
Communities with higher rates of female education have lower rates of child mortality, better nutrition outcomes, stronger civic participation, and greater economic dynamism. This is not correlation — the causal mechanisms are well understood. Education changes what women know, what they expect, and what they are able to negotiate for within their households and communities.
For Nigeria — which ranks among the highest-burden countries in the world for child mortality, malnutrition, and maternal mortality — the case for investing in female education is not just moral. It is one of the highest-return investments available.


The Northern Education Gap
Nigeria's north-south divide in educational attainment is one of the country's most consequential and least adequately addressed inequalities.
Net enrolment rates for girls in basic education are significantly lower in northern states than in southern states, and the gap widens as girls progress through the educational system. By secondary school age, the proportion of northern girls who remain enrolled falls sharply — affected by early marriage, poverty, insecurity, and cultural norms that deprioritise girls' education.

The Boko Haram insurgency made everything worse. The group — whose name translates roughly as "Western education is forbidden" — specifically targeted schools, teachers, and students in the north-east, with devastating effects on educational infrastructure and attendance. The abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 was the most internationally visible episode in a campaign of educational disruption that destroyed hundreds of schools and drove millions of children — disproportionately girls — out of the educational system.

The insurgency is not over. In late 2025, hundreds of schoolchildren were abducted in Kebbi and Niger states. Teachers in north-eastern Nigeria held protests in June 2026, demanding stronger protection for learning institutions. The security threat to education in the north remains real and ongoing.

In this context, the women who are returning to school are doing so in an environment that is simultaneously more welcoming than it was a decade ago and still genuinely dangerous in ways that most Nigerians in the south do not experience.


The Programmes Making It Possible
Several organisations — government agencies, NGOs, and international development partners — have created programmes specifically designed to support adult female learners in northern Nigeria.
The Adult and Non-Formal Education Agency (ANFEA) operates literacy and vocational training programmes across multiple northern states, with components designed for women who cannot attend standard school hours.

UN Women, UNICEF, and international NGOs have funded programmes that combine literacy instruction with health education, economic empowerment training, and psychosocial support. Some of the most effective programmes are those that engage male family members — husbands, fathers-in-law, community leaders — as partners rather than treating them as obstacles.

Religious organisations — including Islamic scholars and women's groups within Muslim communities — have in some cases been significant allies. The argument that Islam places no value on women's education is both theologically inaccurate and practically counterproductive; and there is a growing body of Islamic scholarship in northern Nigeria that actively supports women's education as a religious obligation.


What Hauwa's Story Means for Nigeria
When Hauwa sits in a classroom at 31, learning to read the words she was not taught at 14, she is not just acquiring a skill. She is reclaiming something.
She is demonstrating, to her children and her community, that learning does not end. That it is never too late. That a woman's mind is not something to be kept idle because the household demands are large and the expectations are low and the barriers are real.
These are lessons that will outlast the specific skills any literacy programme can teach.
Nigeria has enormous challenges ahead — economic, political, security challenges that will require the best of every Nigerian citizen's intelligence, energy, and commitment. The women returning to school in the north are not waiting to be included in that story.

They are writing themselves in.



What Nigeria Needs to Do
The trend documented in 2026 is encouraging. It is not sufficient.
Nigeria needs sustained, adequately funded investment in adult female literacy programmes across the north — not as a donor-funded project, but as a federal and state government priority.
It needs safe schools — genuinely safe, with the security infrastructure and intelligence frameworks required to protect students and teachers from abduction and attack.
It needs childcare infrastructure that allows mothers to pursue education without choosing between their children's care and their own development.
It needs community engagement programmes that work with — not around — the social structures and religious frameworks that shape women's lives in northern communities.

And it needs to count these women in its economic planning. The women returning to school are not a charity case. They are an investment. One with some of the highest documented returns of any development intervention available.
Nigeria can afford to make this investment.
It cannot afford not to.

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