Learning on the edge: Impacts of banditry on education and strategic options for resilience in northwest Nigeria

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to analyse the dynamics of violence against educational facilities and students in northwest Nigeria, specifically carried out by bandits. By employing qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, a comprehensive understanding of these attacks is sought. The paper notes schools and students are disproportionately targeted by bandits and are becoming vulnerable for various reasons. These include pervasive failure of governance, diminishing presence of the state in maintaining order, general lack of protection by the government, perceived weakness of students to mount resistance, and bandits’ propensity for illicit profit through ransom payment by victims. These affect the students in six principal ways: loss of lives, increasing burden of fear, rise in sexually transmitted diseases, decreasing enrolment in school, abandonment of educational facilities and forced displacement. In the milieu of banditry in Nigeria’s northwest, it is crucial to adopt the peacebuilding approach and implement security sector reform, safe school initiatives, development, social support and strategic health care delivery to victims in order to successfully eliminate, neutralise, and disrupt (END) attacks by bandits targeting educational facilities.