“I feel hawking is better than begging,” said a 16-year-old SS3 student, standing at a busy Ibadan motor park during school hours. With a tray of sachet water on her head, she captured in seven words what years of policy documents and statistics have failed to fully convey: that Nigeria’s education crisis, at its root, is a poverty crisis and that no amount of education reform will resolve it while the economic conditions driving children onto the streets remain unaddressed.
As DevReporting’s March 2026 investigation shows, hers is not a lone story. Across Oyo State, school-aged children are found manning roadside shops, sent home over unpaid fees, and selling produce in busy markets during school hours — not out of indifference to education, but out of economic necessity. To the policymakers, these children are not truants. But to the families, they are providers.
Despite its reputation as Nigeria’s educational heartland, the Southwest zone faces a deeply troubling reality. According to the 2024 Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index, Oyo State ranks highest in the Southwest for out-of-school children aged 6 to 15, at 20.9 per cent, more than double the national average, while the country’s overall burden has grown to an estimated 14.8 million out-of-school children.
The instinct therefore, is to respond with education-sector solutions: feeding programmes, free tuition, subsidised materials etc. These are necessary, but they are insufficient on their own, because the crisis documented in Oyo’s motor parks and markets is not primarily one of school access. It is one of survival. Families are not choosing hawking over education; they are choosing hawking over destitution, making impossible decisions about which child to keep in school and which to send to work.
The scale of preference that confronts low-income families across Southwest Nigeria is not between one school and another, it is between schooling and survival itself, and that is a scale no family should be forced to operate. What makes this particularly painful is that many of these children have not abandoned education. They are working precisely to fund the schooling they are missing, trapped in a cruel irony where their labour finances an education their labour prevents them from accessing. And even where governments have moved to eliminate formal school charges, hidden costs persist. Unofficial levies like association fees and charges for materials the state already provides are quietly rebuilding the financial barrier that policy sought to remove.
Beyond the urban centres, the challenge deepens further. In rural communities, keeping children in school competes directly with the immediate economic logic of the farm, where every pair of hands has a measurable value. Rather than indifference to education, this is their rational response to a system that has not yet made learning feel more rewarding than survival.
The honest answer is uncomfortable. We cannot school our way out of a poverty problem. Every solution that begins and ends within the education sector, however well designed, is treating a symptom while the underlying condition deepens. The real intervention required is not in the classroom. It is in the household, the market, and the economic structures that determine whether a family wakes up choosing school or survival.
The first thing that must change is how we define the problem. An out-of-school child is not primarily an education statistic. She is evidence of a household that has run out of options. Until social protection systems are designed with that understanding, not as welfare gestures, but as deliberate economic stabilisers, no enrolment drive will hold. Families do not need to be convinced that education matters. They need to be given the conditions under which acting on that belief becomes possible.
The second is that livelihood policy must be treated as education policy. Supporting the parents of these children – petty traders, market women, and informal sector workers – with access to credit, market infrastructure, and income protection is not a separate agenda. It is the upstream intervention that every downstream education programme depends on. A mother who can afford to feed her household without deploying her daughter to hawk goods on the street does not need a sensitisation campaign. She needs a functioning economy at her level.
To say that “hawking is better than begging” is not a rejection of education. It is an assertion of dignity from a child who has not given up, but whose aspirations the system has not yet fully met. The question this puts to every policymaker, development partner, and community leader is a direct one: are we building systems that meet children where they are, or ones that expect children to meet us where we are? Closing that gap requires more than better schools. It requires ensuring that the households behind those schools are stable enough to let their children attend. Learning outcomes cannot improve on empty stomachs, and no classroom reform is complete if the children who need it most are not in the room.
Kehinde Adebayo
Senior Associate, Education Desk
Development Agenda for western Nigeria (DAWN) Commission
This piece draws on reporting by Sodiq Mojibola for DevReporting, published 17 March 2026, in partnership with Education As a Vaccine (EVA) and with support from the Malala Fund Foundation.