FG Raises Education Budget to N3.52 Trillion, Targets Out-of-School Crisis

By Our Correspondent, Abuja

The Federal Government has unveiled a landmark N3.52 trillion allocation for the education sector in the 2025 fiscal year, a move it directly links to the urgent national crusade against the scourge of out-of-school children.

The figure represents a seismic shift in fiscal priority, more than doubling the N1.54 trillion budget for the sector in 2023.

Vice President Kashim Shettima, declaring the state of the nation’s learning population a “national emergency,” stated that the unprecedented budgetary increase under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda by signals a fundamental re-engineering of the government’s commitment to building an enlightened and competitive populace.

He, however, issued a stark warning that traditional government-only funding is now utterly insufficient, calling for a decisive pivot towards collaborative financing with the private sector.

Shettima’s position was delivered on Tuesday in Abuja by his Special Adviser on General Duties, Dr. Aliyu Modibo Umar, at the opening of the 2025 Nigeria Education Forum.

The forum, convened by the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, the Federal Ministry of Education, and the Committee of States’ Commissioners of Education, centred on the theme “Pathways to Sustainable Education Financing: Developing a Synergy Between Town and Gown in Nigeria.”

“Nothing threatens a civilisation more than an uneducated generation. Nations rise when the people, regardless of circumstance, are equipped with the knowledge to imagine a better future and the skills to build it. We are here today because we do not treat education as just a line item in the national budget. We treat it as the foundation of our national identity, the engine of our economic transformation, and the shield of our collective security”, the Vice President’s address read.

The Vice President detailed that Nigeria has reached a “critical inflection point,” necessitating a wholesale shift to “collaborative, innovative, and resilient financing mechanisms.”

He issued a clarion call to the nation’s economic engines: “The burden cannot rest on government alone. We must enlist private sector actors, industry leaders, alumni networks, philanthropists, and communities to co-invest in laboratories, research centres, vocational hubs, innovation clusters, and endowment funds.”

The budgetary breakdown presented to stakeholders reveals targeted, massive injections into key agencies. The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), a critical pillar for infrastructure in higher institutions, has seen its allocation soar from N320.3 billion in 2023 to N683.4 billion in 2024, and now stands at a colossal N1.6 trillion for 2025.

Similarly, interventions at the basic education level have been scaled up. The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) has recently disbursed N92.4 billion in matching grants to 25 states and the Federal Capital Territory. A further N19 billion has been dedicated to teacher development across 32 states and the FCT, while N1.5 billion has reached over 1,147 communities for localised projects.

Consequently, individual state Universal Basic Education grants have leapt from approximately N1.3 billion to over N3.3 billion, enabling states to access more than N6.6 billion through counterpart funding arrangements.

In a landmark development for tertiary access, the newly established Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), birthed from the Student Loans Act of 2024, has commenced operations in earnest. The agency has already disbursed N86.3 billion in loans to over 450,000 students across 218 tertiary institutions nationwide. “This Fund signals a new era where no Nigerian is denied tertiary education for lack of money,” Shettima affirmed.

The Vice President stressed that the financial surge must translate into tangible outcomes: safe schools, well-equipped laboratories, and a professionally recognised teaching workforce. He emphasised that the war against the learning crisis must be waged on all fronts of governance, urging “deliberate collaboration across federal, state, and local government levels,” with a strict focus on “prompt counterpart funding, transparent utilisation of resources, and strict adherence to action plans.”

Notably, he charged local governments and traditional institutions, as the custodians of communities where education begins, to take direct responsibility for “infrastructure development, school maintenance, security, and teacher welfare.”

The monumental N3.52 trillion allocation, therefore, stands as both a statement of intent and a challenge. It is the Tinubu administration’s largest financial commitment to the sector to date, framed not as a panacea, but as a catalytic public investment designed to leverage broader societal capital in what the Vice President has unequivocally termed a national emergency.

The coming months will reveal the strength of the proposed synergy between “Town and Gown” in mobilising the resources needed to reclaim Nigeria’s out-of-school children and redefine its educational destiny.