Ms Lorenza Quadrini:

I do not want to talk about other countries as I would like to stay focused on Nigeria. The picture from Nigeria is very grim but we are working to improve the situation with Plan International. We are especially targeting out-of-school children. Globally, 20% of the out-of-school children of the world are in Nigeria. We are targeting those children through EU funding. We have developed an accelerated education curriculum that has been approved by the ministry of Nigeria and has been approved for roll-out countrywide. We are hoping to bring back as many children as possible to school - children who were not in school before Covid and children who are not coming back to school after Covid.

We are piloting the curriculum in a programme that is ongoing and we have found that we actually can gather all the children who want to go back to school. In organising the courses, training the teachers and organising the courses in facilities that are safe, with the number of students per teacher at no more than 45 children per teacher, as the guidelines say is best practice, we have seen not only that the children learn but also that they do not want to go back to primary school when they have learned enough to be reintegrated. Unfortunately, primary school does not allow them to have the same level of protection and the same level of quality of education that we are providing to them in those courses. That is a new challenge that we are trying to solve now.

That links to the issue of quality education, but it also shows that there is still hope, even in countries and in contexts that are getting worse by the year. When we started the programme in north-east Nigeria the security was not good but definitely was not as bad as it is now. However, we are still managing to get success. We are working with 123 primary schools and we are managing to get the children back to school and managing to teach them as best as we can with the infrastructure we have. We have great teachers in Nigeria because they are qualified and good teachers. I do not know if this answers the question, but I hope it brings some hope.