“Forget about those girls,” the community leader said over the phone. “There is no hope for them to go back to school.”
It was 2021, after COVID-19 had struck the world and shut it down. Children were returning to school after staying at home for months. Malala Fund had just released a report stating that girls were usually the last to return to school after a crisis. To ensure girls returned to school this time, they supported their Education Champion Network partners, including ACE Charity, to advocate for girls’ return to school.
We called community and religious leaders and spoke to them about advocating for girls’ education in their communities.
“In our community, girls go to school,” they said. “We will speak to them,” they reassured us.
“What about the girls that got married while schools were shut down?”, we asked one community leader.
“Forget about those girls,” he replied sternly, with no hesitation. “There is no hope for them to go back to school.”
His response left us in a disarray of emotions. The conversation never left us.
The married girls losing out on education
In Nigeria, 34% of girls marry before age 18, with rates reaching 50% in the northeast and northwest. While the government has made efforts to prevent child marriage through adopting policies like the National Strategy to End Child Marriage, the strategy needs to actually be implemented in every state, leaving married adolescents lost in the fray. They are no longer referred to as children and now called “married women”, usually missing in the data, hidden in communities and excluded from education interventions.
We could hardly contain our excitement when Malala Fund revealed in 2025 that one of their two strategic objectives in Nigeria was to support the education of girls impacted by child marriage. It felt serendipitous that they invested in ACE Charity’s work under the “Married Adolescent and Adolescent Mothers Advocacy” project, MAAMA for short. This work aims to ensure the domestication, financing and implementation of the national guidelines for the re-entry of married adolescents and adolescent mothers into schools in Kano and Adamawa states. Before we could engage with the government, we had to speak to girls and listen to their stories. This journey introduced us to remarkable girls whose stories shaped how we understood the layered realities of child marriage.
Khadija
When we met Khadija last year, she was 17, brimming with youthfulness, beauty and an adorable shyness. Throughout her school years, she was at the top of her class. She had dreams of being a midwife, helping women have safe pregnancies and deliveries. At 15 though, those dreams were cut short. Her parents informed her that she would be getting married to a man she did not know.
Khadija. Source: ACE Charity
“I never thought my parents would make me marry early,” she told me, in a voice heavy with pain. “It wasn’t because of money. We were not suffering.”
Under overwhelming pressure to marry, she made one last attempt to gain some control. Her future husband had to promise to continue her schooling. He agreed, but once she became his wife, he forgot his promise. Khadija was determined though. She continued to ask him to fulfil his promise, and tired of her pestering, he divorced her, discarding her like soapy water from a basin. But the damage was already done. Khadija lives in Kano, where the state forbids married adolescents from going to formal school.
Even though Khadija is unable to go back to formal school, she can explore alternative education pathways. The learning centres or continuing education centres that provide comprehensive education across relevant subjects is one option. However, Khadija lives in a rural community several kilometres away from the closest centre and is unable to travel the long distance, especially with her child. Her other option is a literacy centre located within walking distance. But this centre only provides basic literacy and vocational training on fashion design and soap making. For Khadija, who dropped out of school in grade 11, these trainings are grossly inadequate for her learning needs. This centre does not offer the core subjects she needs to graduate and secure admission into university. To her, it feels like a waste of time and the mind of a student who was once at the top of her class.
In addition, Khadija and other girls we spoke to do not feel comfortable learning in these centres. Called “married women centres”, they are largely populated by women aged 25-40. The girls do not feel like they belong there, and like girls everywhere, they want to learn with their peers.
When we initially met Khadija, she was no longer married but could not go to school. She lived with the quiet hurt of betrayal she felt for her parents, the heavy weight of her dreams unfulfilled and the responsibility of her two-year-old son.
Huson
In Adamawa, we met Huson, living with her mother, grandmother and siblings in a small compound with a garden of potatoes, onions and okra. Her eyes held a certain kind of pain we would soon come to understand, and her arms held a child that did not know his father. When Huson was in her last year of junior secondary school and had to write her qualifying examination to move up to senior secondary school, she asked her mother for money to register for her exams. Her mother told her to find the money herself. Her father, who was always absent, was not an option. Huson, confused and desperate, sought help from her mother’s friend who promised to pay her exam fees.
She wrote her exams, passed them even, but the assistance she received resulted in a pregnancy she did not plan for. Huson now sells kunu, a Nigerian beverage, to fend for herself and her child. Her child’s father left the community when he impregnated her. Young and vulnerable, she continues to face pressure from men who promise support for her and her child in exchange for sexual relationships.
Unlike in Kano, Adamawa state allows adolescent wives or mothers to return to formal school. Many girls fail to return though. Sometimes, they are unable to cope with the stigma they will face from teachers and students. Sometimes, the demands of household responsibilities or a jealous husband bind them home. Sometimes, it is the unanswered question of where they will keep their child if they go to school. For Huson, due to her limited financial resources, she was forced to choose between paying her own school fees or her child’s. Like many mothers, she chose her child.
Huson. Source: ACE Charity
Huson still dreams of returning to school and becoming a lawyer to fight for other people’s rights. However, she carries a deep feeling of hurt for the man who promised to help her, took advantage of her and disappeared; for her father who was never present; and for her mum who at 13, told her to look for the money herself, through any means necessary.
“Up till now,” she said, in a voice shaky with tears, “my mother has not asked me how we got the money to register for my exams.”
The girls we refuse to forget
We met Hadiyatu, the best in her class and nicknamed doctor by her classmates. Married at 14, she moved to her husband’s community where there is no school. Forced to abandon her dream and stay home with children who are unable to go to school, she prays that one day, there will be a school in her community for her and her children.
Maryam. Source: ACE Charity
We also met Maryam, widowed at 16 and left to care for her two kids and Hauwa’u, who at 15 ran away from her physically violent husband and now has a child that depends on her. We met Ummu, the two-year old daughter of 18-year old Naima, eyes filled with mischief and a giggle cuter than a cupcake, who clung to my hands and wouldn’t let go. We feared she would one day lose her innocence as quickly as her mother lost hers.
Hauwa’u. Source: ACE Charity
The data and stories we collected from meeting these girls guided the dialogues we held with policymakers and education stakeholders in Kano and Adamawa. It shaped the re-entry guidelines we drafted with them to promote quality, accessible, and flexible education for adolescent wives and mothers. Thanks to Malala Fund, ACE Charity has successfully launched the guidelines in both states. At the launch of the re-entry guidelines in Kano, some of the married girls empowered by PAGED Initiative, another Malala Fund partner, shared the challenges they faced in returning to school — including the lack of learning spaces near their communities. After hearing this, the state commissioner stood up and instructed two learning spaces be opened up. This action is already being implemented, a testament to the power of sharing girls’ stories.
Following these launches, we will advocate for the guidelines’ efficient financing and effective implementation. We will strengthen the capacity of government stakeholders to implement these changes. We will engage school leaders and teachers to promote stigma-free learning environments. We will hold conversations with husbands, mothers, mothers-in-law and religious and community leaders, so adolescent wives and mothers can continue their schooling. We will empower them to fight for themselves, and we will continue to fight for them.
At the heart of our fight will be the girls we met and the girls we will never meet: girls stubbornly clinging on to big dreams and girls who have let their dreams fade away. Girls who are desperate to go back to school so they can be teachers, doctors, accountants, entrepreneurs and better mothers.
Girls who hope we do not forget them. Girls we were told to forget, who we never will.
