Northeastern Nigeria
We didn't know what was going on. We just felt the blast.
We didn't hear the sound.
I stood up and fell.
I tried to stand up but I fell again because my leg was no more.
Hasan was a 14 year old when a Boko Haram suicide bomber
blew himself up while at school assembly.
His legs were badly damaged and for more than one year,
he was unable to attend school because he did not have a wheelchair.
Boko Haram roughly translated from Hausa language means "Western education is forbidden."
The group has sought to implement this ideology while initially harassing and intimidating teachers
and students to stop them from attending schools.
There were some notes which were placed by the Boko Haram people
that if they catch any teacher teaching in the public schools, they will kill him.
Between 2009 and 2016, the group had killed more than 600 teachers,
and destroyed more than 900 schools, forcing about 1500 to close.
All of this has had devastating effects on access to education for children.
For this research we traveled to the heart of the Boko Haram conflict.
Boko Haram is active in mostly the northeast of Nigeria particularly the states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa.
I’m here at Success International private school.
This area is the old town of Maiduguri.
This school was the very first reported school attack by individuals suspected to be members of Boko Haram.
In this school they burnt down a classroom here and a computer laboratory at this end.
After that the school was attacked two times more.
We saw people banging at the gate.
There was a watchman there and the watchman was like asking who is there, who is there? And they wouldn’t answer.
Then they jumped over the fence and everyone started running.
I saw them with their guns.
Everybody running and I can’t run around that time – I was afraid.
Then we saw them bring our coach. When they brought him here, they stopped and told him to raise his hands.
When he did, they shot him and he fell.
Three of the teachers were killed during that attack.
And after then the decision that we the school management made, we have to close down the school.
So for about three good months, the academic work came to a standstill.
The students, most of the staff – they have to flee to the various states.
Then, in fact because my life was in danger I have to leave the state and the country as a whole.
As Boko Haram’s attacks continued, a pattern of attacks began to emerge.
The group would kill male students and teachers but girls they were targeted for abduction.
The best-known school attack and abduction happened on April 14, 2014
at the government girl secondary school Chibok, where the group abducted 276 teenage school girls.
57 of them managed to escape but til today
2 years later, there are still missing 219 girls.
But even after Chibok had happened, in November of that same year,
the group took over the town of Damasak.
They [Boko Haram] went to Zanna Morbarti Primary School, attacked it and closed both gates.
There were at least 300 children held captive besides those that escaped.
They were teaching them Quran in the school with the gates locked.
Today we don’t know where our children in the primary school were taken.
Boko Haram is not the only group that has interfered with education in North East Nigeria.
The Nigerian security forces have also used schools for military purposes.
So basically this is the old Kunduga Girls’ Elementary School.
It’s now being occupied and used as the brigade headquarters for the army.
There were soldiers there, residing in the school,
so they [Boko Haram] came and attacked the soldiers there,
and burnt the whole school including my office, office of the principal, staff room.
All the things there burnt to ashes.
There have been attempts to fill the education void by the government and humanitarian organizations.
The services are provided by volunteer teachers
with very little in terms of educational materials and resources,
We have so many challenges, we don’t have toilet,
we have problems of water, we don’t have materials now, like textbooks.
An entire generation of children from the North East have been robbed of their right to education.
The Nigerian government can help this situation by stopping the use of schools for military purposes
and ensuring protection for schools in unsafe areas and also ensuring that school-aged children
are able to access education wherever they are.
Honestly our education has gone backward a lot here in Maiduguri.
Everything that is happening is a result of lack of education and lack of something to do.