The new report from the World Bank on Nigeria has a part that stops you in your tracks. About 65% of kids in the Southwest of the United States can write a simple word. When you go north, to the Northwest, that number drops to 10%. The same country. The same age group. A 55-point gap that has nothing to do with how smart a child is and everything to do with where they were born.
The report, which was made by the World Bank’s Education Global Department and Living Standards Measurement Study, is the first long-term look at how well preschool-aged children in Nigeria do in school and how well they can use their executive functioning. It looks at data from the country’s General Household Survey from 2023 to 2024 and checks four things: reading and writing, math, social and emotional skills, and executive function. The results aren’t all bad, which is normal for real research; they’re also not all good news either.
Literacy doesn’t hold up as well as math. There are good signs with social and emotional skills. But there are serious problems with the structure below the averages. Kids in rural areas always fall behind their peers in cities. The literacy rate for children whose mothers did not go to school is only 9%, but it is 75% for children whose mothers went to college. Children who have at least one book at home are 50% more likely to write something than those who don’t. Findings like these aren’t really a surprise, but seeing them all in one report makes them seem more important.
Nutrition is what the data keeps coming back to. About 40% of Nigerian children are stunted, which means that they have not grown properly because they have not been getting enough food. Children who are stunted do much worse on basic reading and math tasks. You can have the best early childhood education system in the world, but if kids are already sick from not getting enough food for years, the classroom can only do so much. This is what the report says. Stunting isn’t just a side note. It’s a ceiling constructed of wood.
Reading through the results makes it seem like what Nigeria is going through on a large scale is similar to what many countries, even wealthier ones, are going through in some areas. The gap between rural and urban areas, the importance of maternal education, and the link between household resources and school readiness are not unique to Nigeria. In parts of the American South, rural Appalachia, and Southwest reservation communities, the same things happen, but with different numbers. Even if the severity varies, the mechanisms are still easy to spot.
What the World Bank suggests is not a big deal. Make it easier for more kids to get a good early education, especially in rural and northern areas. Spend a lot of money to cut down on stunting. Better measuring tools should be added to national surveys so that policymakers can see what’s really working. Start earlier. The report is mostly about kids ages four to six, but development starts before birth, and the time between pregnancy and age three may be more important.
The report says that kids who go to daycare are about 50% more likely to be able to name at least ten letters and count to ten. That’s not a small discovery. It’s an argument for infrastructure, for the boring, expensive, and politically tough work of setting up and maintaining early learning systems in places that don’t have many of them right now.
It has more than 200 million people, and more than 82 million are younger than 14 years old. It depends on what happens in the next few years whether the demographic math works out better or worse for the country. It’s still not clear if there is political will to handle this as an emergency. The information is now on the table, though. The World Bank has already done that part. The rest is up to the governments of Lagos, Abuja, and, to be honest, capitals in places other than West Africa.
