By S. A. Ndanusa, PhD, OON
Every morning, while other children prepare for school, some of our children prepare for the street.
They take up positions at traffic lights, markets, motor parks, restaurants and the entrances to places of worship. They appear at weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals, political rallies and almost every gathering where Nigerians are likely to arrive with food, money or a temporarily softened heart.
They understand the geography of generosity.
They know which junctions carry the most vehicles, which restaurants produce leftovers and when worshippers will emerge from the mosque or church. They know that Friday offers greater possibilities around the mosque, Sunday may be more rewarding near the church, and political gatherings can be particularly promising because food is sometimes more reliable than the promises.
Begging has become a daily occupation for children who should have a daily education.
At a traffic light, a young boy moves carefully between vehicles. He has learnt to judge when the signal will change, which driver may give something and which window will remain firmly closed. He may not yet understand fractions, but he has mastered the economics of rush hour.
Some motorists give him money or food. Others look straight ahead with the intense concentration of people who have suddenly discovered something fascinating about the traffic light. A few lower their windows and advise him to go to school.
Then the light turns green.
The motorist continues to the office. The child continues to the next vehicle. Nigeria continues to the next conference on out of school children.
We have seen this scene so often that it no longer shocks us. The child has become part of the urban landscape, like the traffic warden, the newspaper vendor and the impatient motorcyclist. We notice him without really seeing him.
That may be the most disturbing part of the problem. We have normalised what should be a national emergency.
These children did not all arrive on the street by the same road.
Some were sent away from home to pursue Qur’anic education under a system that can no longer adequately support them. Some fled communities emptied by insurgency, banditry or communal violence. Others followed their families into cities whose promise of opportunity ended at a traffic junction. Some come from households broken by extreme poverty, death, illness or abandonment. Others are children with disabilities displayed by adults who have converted human vulnerability into an income generating asset.
They are Muslim and Christian, northern and southern, displaced and resident. Their stories are different, but their destination is increasingly the same.
Begging is acquiring national currency.
The Almajiri child remains one of the most visible faces of this crisis, particularly across northern Nigeria. But he is not its only face. It would therefore be wrong to treat every child beggar as an Almajiri, just as it would be wrong to deny that the collapse of the support structure around many Tsangaya schools has placed large numbers of children on the streets.
The distinction matters because a problem with several entrances cannot be solved by closing only one door.
The Almajiri tradition was not created as a system of organised begging. Its roots lie in the honourable Islamic practice of travelling in search of knowledge. Young boys left their communities to study the Qur’an under respected scholars. The teacher instructed them, the community supported them and parents remained connected to their welfare.
There was knowledge at the centre and a social structure around it.
Over time, the knowledge tradition survived, but much of the support structure disappeared. Communities became poorer and less cohesive. Families began sending children far away without providing adequately for them. Mallams accepted more pupils than they could reasonably feed, house and supervise. Small settlements expanded into large, impersonal cities where the old communal arrangements could no longer carry the burden.
The system continued travelling after its economic vehicle had broken down.
The Mallam was still expected to teach. The child was still expected to learn. But nobody could satisfactorily answer who would provide food, accommodation, healthcare, clothing and learning materials.
So, society found an answer that required very little organisation from the rest of us.
We left the children begging in traffic.
But we must be careful not to make the Almajiri system the sole defendant in a case with many accused persons.
Conflict has displaced families across the country. Rural economies have weakened. Social protection remains thin and uneven. Cities attract people without adequately absorbing them. Disability support is grossly insufficient. Family responsibility has declined in some places, while organised begging networks have discovered that public sympathy can be turned into private profit.
The child on the street may therefore be an Almajiri, an internally displaced child, an orphan, a runaway, a victim of trafficking or simply the son or daughter of a family that has reached the outer limits of survival.
The street may bring them together, but their pathways out cannot be identical.
A displaced child may need family tracing, resettlement and trauma support. A child controlled by an organised begging network requires rescue and protection from exploitation. A child accompanying an impoverished parent may need household income support and access to school. A child attached to a Tsangaya requires a properly funded educational and welfare arrangement that preserves Qur’anic learning while providing basic education and protection.
This is why Nigeria needs a National Child Street Exit Framework.
The purpose would not be merely to remove children from prominent roads before an important visitor arrives. Nigeria has sometimes mistaken the removal of evidence for the solution of a problem. A successful operation is not one that makes the streets look tidy for a week. It is one that ensures the children do not need to return.
Every child found begging should first be treated as a child requiring protection, not immediately labelled a vagrant, criminal or Almajiri. The authorities should determine who the child is, where the child came from, who is responsible for the child and what circumstances brought the child onto the street.
That assessment should lead to an appropriate pathway into education, family support, healthcare, rehabilitation or safe accommodation. The response must follow the child’s circumstances rather than forcing every child into the same administrative box.
Within this broader national framework, the Almajiri dimension requires its own culturally appropriate intervention.
The answer is not to condemn Qur’anic education, criminalise Mallams or treat the Tsangaya tradition as an obstacle to modern life. Such an approach would insult a respected institution, provoke understandable resistance and discard the very religious and community legitimacy required to make reform succeed.
The task is not to uproot the tradition. It is to rescue it from the conditions that now undermine both its dignity and its children.
Government has attempted several interventions. Model Almajiri schools have been built. Committees have been established. Programmes have been launched with the familiar combination of speeches, banners, dignitaries and bottled water.
Some of these interventions were thoughtful and produced useful facilities. Many, however, struggled after the commissioning ceremonies because a school cannot survive permanently on the enthusiasm with which it was opened.
The photographs may last for years. The food supply rarely does.
A building does not automatically provide trained teachers, safe accommodation, clean water, healthcare or a reliable system for monitoring each child. Government may hand over the keys on Monday, but someone must still operate the school every other day of the week.
The next intervention should therefore begin by rebuilding the social and financial system around the child.
Government must remain responsible for basic education. That obligation cannot be transferred to mosques, churches or philanthropists merely because public finances are under pressure. Public authorities should provide qualified teachers, curriculum support, inspection, infrastructure and access to existing education funds.
Mallams should retain their important role in Qur’anic instruction and moral formation. But any Tsangaya school receiving public or community support must accept registration, proper records, minimum standards for accommodation and sanitation, child protection rules and regular inspection.
Parents must also remain part of the arrangement. Poverty may make responsibility difficult, but it does not make parenthood disappear. Every child should have an identifiable parent or guardian who remains connected to the child’s welfare and educational progress.
The Muslim community must then organise its considerable charitable capacity around this structure.
Islam already provides the instruments. Zakat, sadaqah and waqf have historically supported education, welfare and public institutions. Wealthy Muslims build mosques, sponsor pilgrimages, distribute food during Ramadan and respond generously to personal appeals.Ordinary Muslims also give constantly, even when the economy has reduced the distance between the giver and the person seeking help.
What is missing is not generosity. It is organisation.
Our giving is often spontaneous, scattered and difficult to measure. We feed a child today without knowing how he will eat tomorrow. We give him money at the traffic light without knowing whether he attends any school, where he sleeps or who is responsible for him. We distribute clothes during Ramadan and return the following year to discover that the child has grown but his circumstances have not.
Charity can relieve suffering. Only an institution can prevent its repetition.
Nigeria should therefore establish an independently governed Almajiri Education and Advancement Waqf within the wider National Child Street Exit Framework.
The waqf should receive regular contributions from mosques, zakat bodies, individuals, businesses and Nigerians in the diaspora. A civil servant should be able to contribute a modest amount every month. A wealthy family could endow a learning centre. A company could finance healthcare, computers or vocational equipment. A mosque congregation could support a participating Tsangaya school.
Technology now makes regular giving easy. Our banks have already demonstrated that small deductions, repeated consistently, can become surprisingly significant. For once, let the surprise be entirely pleasant.
But trust must come before fundraising. Nigerians will contribute if they believe the institution is genuine and can see what their money achieves. The waqf must therefore have credible trustees, professional management, Shariah supervision, independent audits and publicly available accounts.
Government may participate, but it should not dominate the institution or treat its resources as another convenient fund awaiting official attention.
Every participating child should be properly registered without exposing the child’s identity to the public. Each Tsangaya receiving support should meet minimum standards. Funding should follow the child into the learning centre and provide food, healthcare, books, safe accommodation and competent instructors. It should also support the Mallam so that the survival of the school no longer depends on sending pupils onto the streets.
The curriculum should preserve serious Qur’anic education while adding literacy, numeracy, civic knowledge, digital exposure and practical skills. A child should not have to choose between understanding his faith and understanding the world in which he must practise it.
There is no theological conflict between memorising the Qur’an and learning mathematics. A young Muslim does not become less devout because he can operate a computer, understand a bank transaction or read the instructions on a medicine bottle.
Ignorance has never been one of the pillars of Islam.
Children outside the Almajiri system must receive equally serious attention through the national framework. A non-Muslim child, a displaced child or a child with a disability should not become invisible merely because the most familiar public discussion centres on the Almajiri.
Public responsibility must follow vulnerability, not religion.
A national framework would allow government to bring education, social welfare, health, humanitarian response, disability support and law enforcement into one coordinated arrangement. At present, a child can fall between several agencies, each of which recognises only the part of the problem written into its mandate.
The child, however, does not experience life according to the organisational chart of government.
There is also the unavoidable question of banning street begging. At some point, government must prohibit it, particularly where children are involved.
But the sequence matters.
If government begins with a ban before creating a workable alternative, the children may disappear from major roads only to reappear in markets, residential areas, uncompleted buildings or neighbouring states. We would have tidied the city without rescuing the child.
The transition should begin with identifying and registering children, mapping Tsangaya schools and other begging networks, tracing families and determining the actual cost of education, care and reintegration. The trafficking, exploitation or forced deployment of children for begging should stop immediately because abuse requires no transition period.
Government and its partners should then establish genuine alternatives. Children must have access to school, food, basic healthcare, protection and a responsible adult. Participating Tsangaya schools must receive sufficient support to keep pupils in a safe learning environment. Extremely poor families should be connected to social assistance so that a prohibition does not simply remove one of their few means of survival without providing another.
Once these arrangements are functioning in a community, child street begging should be formally prohibited there and the prohibition firmly enforced.
Enforcement must protect the child rather than punish the child. A young person removed from the street should be taken to a safe reception and assessment centre, not a police cell. The parent, guardian, Mallam or adult controller should be identified. Adults who repeatedly send children to beg or profit from their vulnerability should face appropriate sanctions.
The ban should not wait forever, but neither should it arrive alone. It must come carrying a school place, a meal, a responsible adult and a future.
We should begin in carefully selected communities rather than announce another nationwide revolution before completing the beneficiary register. A properly designed pilot would establish the real cost of supporting each child and test cooperation among government, religious institutions, communities, schools, parents and social agencies.
If the arrangement works, it can expand. If it fails, we should correct it before ordering more banners.
Success should not be judged mainly by the amount of money raised, the number of buildings commissioned or the quantity of branded schoolbags distributed. It should be visible in the life of the child who no longer spends the day moving between vehicles, waiting outside restaurants or following worshippers from places of worship.
It should be visible in a child who is safe, properly fed and learning; a child who can read, write and calculate; a child who can progress in religious education where that is the family’s choice while also acquiring the knowledge required for modern life; a child who can eventually enter secondary school, learn a trade, work in agriculture, start an enterprise or pursue a profession.
Children who beg are often discussed mainly as future security threats. That is an unfortunate reduction of human lives. They are not merely potential problems from which comfortable society must protect itself. They are citizens whose intelligence and possibilities society has failed to develop.
Naturally, educating and protecting them will improve national security. Criminal networks rarely establish schools, but they are always recruiting. A child without education, livelihood or belonging is vulnerable to anyone offering food, money and a false sense of purpose.
But fear should not be our principal motivation. We should rescue these children not only because of what may happen if we fail, but because of what they may become if we succeed.
The child approaching us in traffic does not need another hurried donation followed by another national conference. That child needs government, family, religious institutions and the wider society to organise their responsibilities around a future.
We did not simply find these children begging on our streets.
Through conflict, poverty, failing institutions and years of looking away, we left them there.
It is time to bring them back.
Suleyman A. Ndanusa, PhD, OON, is an economist, lawyer, strategic studies scholar, and public policy thinker and practitioner with extensive experience in financial markets, regulation, governance, national Security and development.
