Every October, a well-known scene takes place in a conference room in Lagos or Abuja. A few schools’ worth of kids enter the stage wearing matching uniforms, say a few lines about kindness, safety, or peace, and then return to their seats to cheers. Warm remarks are made by representatives of the National Commission for Colleges of Education. A message of goodwill is sent by a member of OMEP’s Africa leadership. It’s easy to write off this type of event as ceremonial. However, OMEP Nigeria has been holding similar events for over 40 years, and beneath the pageantry is a much more difficult argument that the organization has been quietly and persistently presenting to any government official who will listen.
The argument is fairly straightforward: funding for children under the age of five is more beneficial than funding for nearly every other area of the educational system, dollar for dollar. According to a commonly used estimate, the return on investment ranges from seven to thirteen dollars. For years, OMEP Nigeria has relied on that math in policy papers, conference keynote addresses, and advocacy language that seldom makes headlines but gradually influences how a topic is discussed in official circles.
It’s important to state clearly that Nigeria’s budget for education has increased significantly. Federal allotments increased from approximately ₦602 billion in 2019 to approximately ₦1.59 trillion by 2024. In the cycles of 2025 and 2026, they surpassed ₦3.5 trillion. That appears to be significant progress on paper. Those who keep a close eye on this, however, feel that the figures overstate the situation.
The problem, which OMEP Nigeria keeps bringing up, is that early childhood education still lacks a specific federal budget line. The funding for children under six is integrated into the larger basic education budget and distributed among state-level programs, pre-primary linkages added to primary schools, and any UNICEF or World Bank-sponsored projects that are currently underway. Less than ten percent of total education spending is believed to reach the early years specifically, and because the figure isn’t tracked on its own, nobody can say with confidence whether that share is even growing.
This is, more or less, the gap OMEP Nigeria has built its advocacy around since the country’s first contact with the global organization back in 1968, when a delegate named Ibiyemi Bright attended a UNESCO gathering and brought the idea home. Under successive national presidents, the group has pushed the same basic demand at conferences, in op-eds, and in meetings with education ministries: give early childhood its own line item, track it, and hold someone accountable for spending it well.
Whether that demand has actually moved a budget is hard to prove. It’s possible OMEP Nigeria’s advocacy has shifted attitudes more than allocations, planting an idea that surfaces later in policy documents written by people who attended one of those conferences years earlier. Influence in policy work is rarely traceable that cleanly. What’s clearer is that the organization hasn’t stopped asking, year after year, for something that still doesn’t exist on the federal ledger. Whether that persistence eventually forces the issue, or simply becomes part of the background noise of Nigerian education policy, is the part nobody can answer yet.
