By Sodiq Alabi
Jeleosinmi in Yoruba literally means “let the home rest,” and it was the term for early education or day care when I was growing up in the 1990s in Osun. I don’t know how long it’s been called that, but I have always thought it is apt as a term for the level of learning children used to receive in those one-room centres. The centres in those days were mainly a way for parents to free themselves of childcare burden for a few hours. Parents did not expect much learning to take place, but perhaps they should have, as early years education has now been established to play an important role in education.
A recent report, Understanding Early Childhood Development in Nigeria by the World Bank, evaluates the current state of early years education in Nigeria. Its findings paint a worrying picture for a country that’s home to the third-largest population of under-14 children in the world, and deserve more attention than they have received in the media and from Nigerians.
The report, which was based on the 2023/2024 General Household Survey-Panel, focuses on children aged four to six, the years when the brain is most receptive to language, numeracy, and social learning. It found that only 24.1% of children aged four to six can write a simple word beyond their own name. Just 38.6% can follow text from left to right. Counting to ten is beyond the reach of more than a third of children assessed.
Image from World Bank’s Understanding Early Childhood Development in Nigeria (2025)
While some can argue that four-to-six-year-old children have their whole lives ahead of them to acquire literacy and numeracy skills, the findings in the report are nonetheless early signals of what a child will and will not be able to do when they enter primary school. As data on primary school outcomes have shown, these early gaps rarely close on their own.
But what makes the data particularly instructive is the unevenness of the results across regions. As with most national education data, the gap between northern and southern Nigeria is quite wide
Image from World Bank’s Understanding Early Childhood Development in Nigeria (2025)
For example, while in the South West, 65.2% of children can write a simple word. In the North West and North East, that figure falls to roughly 10%. You also see signs of regional dichotomy in enrolment numbers: around 95% of children aged four to six have attended school or daycare in the south; in the northeast, that figure is a mere 30.1%. This regional divide extends beyond basic ABCs to complex cognitive skills. For example, the ability to plan, pay attention, and remember instructions shows significant variability. Nationally, the most difficult task for Nigerian children is planning ahead, which only 20.4% of children can currently do.
The urban-rural divide rears its head in this report, too, as urban pre-schoolers were found to consistently outperform their rural peers across every measured domain, from literacy to executive function. While 66.7% of urban children can name ten letters, only 39.6% of rural children can. For writing a simple word, the gap is equally stark: 48.3% versus 17.3%.
There is a near-absence of early educational access in parts of the country, compounded by conflict, concentrated poverty, and lower adult educational attainment in those regions.
As has been reported by other research efforts, the consequences of a lack of education engagement in early years do not stay contained to childhood. Early literacy and numeracy deficits feed directly into primary and secondary school performance. Children who arrive at school without foundational skills struggle to catch up without well-resourced, deliberate intervention. Over time, this shapes national literacy rates and the productive capacity of the workforce. The connection between early education and long-run development is one of the most robust findings in development economics. Human capital formed in the early years is among the highest-return investments a government can make, and neglect at this stage carries costs that accumulate across decades.
There are, however, lessons to pick from the report, lessons that could help parents and state governments improve their planning. For one, the age at which a child becomes exposed to education matters a lot. Four-year-olds who have been in early education consistently outperform six-year-olds who have not.
Children who first enrolled in daycare at age two have a 75.3% success rate in writing a simple word by the time they are six, compared to 41.1% for those enrolled at age four, and 23.5% for those enrolled at age five.
Enrolment in daycare/early education is not the only important element here, but actual exposure to books and exercises that engage a child’s brain. This does not necessarily have to happen in a school setting, but it should happen nonetheless. And this is why a mother’s level of education emerges as one of the most powerful individual predictors of a child’s performance. Among children whose mothers have no formal schooling, which describes more than half of the mothers in the sample, only 9.3% can write a simple word. That share rises to 74.8% among children of mothers with tertiary qualifications. Given that just 9.1% of mothers hold a tertiary degree in Nigeria, the majority of Nigerian children begin life with considerably reduced developmental support at home. This is another reason why Nigeria has to take female education seriously, especially in the regions where female enrolment still lags male enrolment.
Another important insight from the report is the impact of childhood malnutrition on education. Stunting affects 42.7% of boys and 38.5% of girls under five nationally, and its cognitive effects are measurable and severe. Only 4.5% of stunted four-year-olds can write a simple word, compared to 20.9% of non-stunted peers.
A chronically undernourished child contends with various health problems and struggles to learn. The child’s educational readiness has already been shaped by hunger before they have set foot in a classroom.
This piece is becoming longer than I intended, so let me end on this note: Nigeria’s youth dependency ratio is very high, particularly in the North East, where there are 107 children for every 100 working-age adults, which makes it imperative we invest in children.
Image from World Bank’s Understanding Early Childhood Development in Nigeria (2025)
Of course, Nigeria’s demographic profile could, under the right conditions, become an extraordinary economic asset instead of a liability, but we have to do more than the barest minimum to turn our large population of children into a real asset. This is an economic emergency. The way forward includes massive expansion of pre-primary and primary education access and quality in northern regions, prioritising early enrolment, supporting female education, and treating child malnutrition as an educational priority as much as a health one.
Sodiq Alabi writes regularly for Arbiterz and leads programmes at EduIntel.