Thirteen Unsafe Buildings: A Community-Led Look at Nigeria's Public School Infrastructure Gap

Toyin Olanrewaju
2 days ago
8 min read

A reflection on need, community readiness, and the gap between the schools Nigeria has and the ones its children deserve

In February 2026, GAMSU opened a formal, structured nomination process for the Ideal School Campaign: a public call for communities across four focus states to identify public schools in urgent need of infrastructure improvement. The states were Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Kaduna, and Nassarawa. The nomination window ran for 33 days.

What we were asking communities to do was, on its face, simple. Fill out a form. Describe the condition of a school. Tell us who was affected and what was most broken. We designed the process to be accessible, transparent, and free of the community-as-spectacle dynamic that often compromises public campaigns about poverty and need. There were no photographs of children required. The emphasis was on infrastructure, not individuals.

By March 16, 2026, 14 schools had been formally nominated through the official online form. All four target states were represented. Kaduna submitted seven nominations. Nassarawa submitted four. Akwa Ibom submitted two. Cross River submitted one.

We will return to that geographic distribution. It matters.

WHAT THE DATA SAYS

Before interpreting the nominations, it is worth stating what they actually contained.

Thirteen of the 14 nominated schools reported unsafe buildings. Eleven had no electricity. Nine had no access to clean water. In most cases, these were not isolated failures occurring in otherwise functional schools. They were simultaneous. Dilapidated classrooms, broken furniture, absent sanitation, and structural safety risks were reported together, in the same schools, serving populations of between 300 and 1,000 students each. Nine of the 14 nominated schools fell within that enrollment band.

The reasonable assumption is that schools which were not nominated face conditions that are no better, and may be considerably worse.

What this describes is not the extreme edge of school deprivation. These are mid-sized schools in communities that were sufficiently organised and motivated to engage with a formal nomination process. The reasonable assumption is that the schools which were not nominated, schools in communities with less organisational capacity, fewer educated nominators, or less awareness of the campaign, face conditions that are no better, and may be considerably worse.

Nigeria's own Federal Education Roadmap 2024 to 2027 acknowledges that 18% of primary school classrooms are in poor condition, rising to 40% at the senior secondary level. UBEC data indicate that more than half of the country's public schools lack adequate classrooms and basic amenities.

UNICEF and WHO joint monitoring data from 2023 places the number of Nigerian schoolchildren without any sanitation service at school at 32 million, with 47 million lacking hygiene services. These figures are not contested. They appear in government documents and in the reports of agencies working in formal partnership with the Nigerian state.

The 14 nominations we received did not produce these statistics. They are consistent with them. That is the point.

When a small sample of schools nominated through a community-led campaign reflects the same pattern documented in federal planning documents and international monitoring data, what you have is not an anomaly. You have a confirmation.

The problem is not isolated or localised. It is structural and widespread, and it has been so for long enough that it now appears in government roadmaps as a baseline condition rather than a crisis.

THE HARDER QUESTION

Nigeria allocates approximately 5 to 6 per cent of its federal budget to education, a figure that falls below the UNESCO-recommended threshold of 15 to 20 per cent and below the African Union benchmark of 10 per cent. It also falls below what several comparable economies in sub-Saharan Africa have committed.

The gap between what is allocated and what reaches school infrastructure specifically is wider still, because capital expenditure in education competes with recurrent costs — primarily teacher salaries — which consistently absorb the majority of what is available.

This is the context within which school buildings deteriorate.

It is not a mystery. It is a predictable outcome of chronic underfunding, weak maintenance systems, and the absence of binding infrastructure standards that school operators are held accountable for.

When buildings fall into disrepair and are not repaired, they communicate something to the children inside them. Not metaphorically. Concretely. Children read their environments. A school that has not been maintained is a school that has not been prioritised, and children in that school know it.

Asking a teacher to motivate a student in a structurally unsafe building with no electricity and no clean water is not a pedagogical challenge. It is an infrastructure problem being miscast as a human one.

The research on this is not ambiguous. Studies on school infrastructure and learning outcomes, from the United States, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, consistently find that physical learning environments affect student attendance, concentration, and academic performance.

Poor lighting, inadequate ventilation, structural insecurity, and the absence of functional sanitation all have measurable effects on the cognitive bandwidth available to a child in the classroom. Asking a teacher to motivate a student in a structurally unsafe building with no electricity and no clean water is not a pedagogical challenge. It is an infrastructure problem being miscast as a human one.

Nigeria has a significant number of highly capable teachers working in exactly these conditions. That they continue to show up is not a reason to be satisfied. It is a reason to be honest about what we are asking of them.

WHAT THE NOMINATIONS DID NOT SHOW: RESIGNATION

Fourteen submissions. Fourteen communities confirmed, without exception, their willingness to support and maintain improvements if their school was selected.

That unanimity is worth pausing on.

Community ownership is often treated in development discourse as a checkbox: something that needs to be established before an intervention can be justified. In practice, it is harder to generate than that framing suggests. People who have watched public institutions fail them repeatedly and over the years do not automatically trust new processes. Participation fatigue is real. Scepticism about whether anything will actually change is rational.

The communities are not passive. The question is whether the frameworks they are offered are worth engaging with.

What the nominations suggested was that the appetite for engagement is present, even where trust in institutions has been tested. Submissions came from NGO representatives, teachers, community leaders, alumni, and parents. Several included independent social media advocacy and supporting documentation.

In at least one documented case, a nomination triggered community-led rehabilitation work at the school before GAMSU's assessment had concluded. That is not a programmatic outcome. It is what happens when a credible structure gives communities a reason to act on the investment they were already prepared to make.

This is a meaningful data point, and it complicates the narrative that infrastructure improvement in Nigerian public schools requires external will to be imported into passive communities. The communities are not passive. The question is whether the frameworks they are offered are worth engaging with.

THE GEOGRAPHIC QUESTION

Kaduna accounted for half the nominations. Nassarawa accounted for roughly a third. Cross River and Akwa Ibom together submitted three of the 14.

This imbalance should not be read as evidence that schools in the underrepresented states are better off. The state of public school infrastructure in Cross River and Akwa Ibom does not support that interpretation. What it reflects, more plausibly, is a combination of campaign reach and network density. Nominations spread through personal connections, WhatsApp groups, teacher networks, and community organisations. Where GAMSU's networks were stronger or more active, nominations were more numerous. Where they were thinner, participation lagged.

This is a legitimate critique of the campaign's first iteration, and we are prepared to name it as one. A nomination-based model for identifying need is only as good as the communities it reaches. If the communities with the greatest need are also the communities least connected to the networks through which the campaign travelled, then the model has a built-in bias toward areas that are already better networked.

Correcting for this in future iterations will require more deliberate outreach — specifically to teacher associations, parent-teacher bodies, and community development groups in the underrepresented states.

WHAT THIS CAMPAIGN IS AND IS NOT

The Ideal School Campaign will select one school. It will fund and document a targeted infrastructure intervention focused on classroom rehabilitation, water and sanitation, furniture, and foundational safety improvements. That school will be documented carefully as a replicable model: a record of what a functional, dignified public school environment can look like and what it takes, in practical and financial terms, to achieve it.

This is not a solution to the problem described in this piece. It would be dishonest to position it as one. One school, however well-executed, does not close a gap measured in the tens of thousands. What it can do is provide evidence.

Evidence of what is possible on a responsible budget. Evidence that community partnership works. Evidence that structured, transparent assessment produces outcomes that communities trust. Evidence, in short, that the problem is solvable, which is a different kind of contribution than a renovation, and arguably a more durable one.

Nigeria's public school infrastructure will not be fixed by foundations. It will be fixed by sustained public investment, accountable local governance, and a policy environment that treats school buildings as essential infrastructure.

Nigeria's public school infrastructure will not be fixed by foundations. It will be fixed by sustained public investment, accountable local governance, and a policy environment that treats school buildings as essential infrastructure rather than discretionary capital expenditure. Organisations like GAMSU can demonstrate what that looks like. They cannot substitute for it.

That distinction is important to state clearly, because the risk in campaigns of this kind is that they make progress in ways that relieve pressure on the systems that are actually responsible. We do not want to be that. We want to be a reference point for what responsible, documented, community-partnered intervention can produce, and an argument for why it should be standard, not exceptional.

THE WORK AHEAD

The assessment phase is now underway. Each of the 14 nominations will be reviewed against six published criteria: infrastructure condition, safety risk, access to water and sanitation, enrollment and impact potential, community ownership, and replicability. Shortlisted schools may undergo site verification. One will be selected.

Whatever school is chosen, the communities that were not chosen will still have the same schools they nominated. This is not something we can resolve within this campaign. It is something we intend to keep visible, because the nominations are not just a selection pool. They are a record. Thirteen unsafe buildings. Eleven schools without electricity. Nine without clean water. These are documented conditions that exist independently of whether GAMSU selects the schools they belong to.

We are grateful to every community that submitted a nomination, and to every individual who took the process seriously enough to gather evidence, fill out a form, and put their school's name forward. The information they provided is useful beyond this campaign. It is part of a broader body of evidence about the state of public school infrastructure in Nigeria, contributed by the people who know it best.

The gap between the public education system Nigeria has, and the one its children are entitled to is not a secret. It is documented, acknowledged, and insufficiently acted upon. This campaign is one attempt to act. We are under no illusion that it is enough. But we believe it is serious, and we intend to keep making the case that seriousness is exactly what the problem requires.

Data sources and references

Federal Ministry of Education, Nigeria. Nigeria Education Roadmap 2024–2027.

Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC). State of Basic Education Infrastructure Report.

UNICEF / WHO Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. 2023 data: Nigeria school WASH.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Government expenditure on education as % of GDP and total government expenditure — Nigeria.

African Union. Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA 16–25). Financing benchmarks.