Project Summary

Bauchi state is one of the poorest performing states in Nigeria in areas of girls’ education access rates, dropout and repetition rates, pupil-teacher ratios, the percentage of unqualified teachers, and the number of vulnerable children, including boys, and school infrastructure. According to UNESCO(2023), Nigeria has over 20 million out-of-school children, and 1.2 million of these children are in Bauchi, and a majority of them are girls. Corruption, misappropriation, and underfunding remain the major hindrances to girls’ access to free and compulsory education in Nigeria and Bauchi state. The lack of strong citizen-centric accountability and transparency mechanisms to checkmate education spending has left a wide gap for pervasive corruption and, in turn, led to a decline in the quality of education and a widening gap between girls’ education and boys.

Bauchi state has a State Education Account (SEA), a transparent framework for measuring education expenditures and comparing them to policy directions. The SEA provides a snapshot by gathering information on all spending, from public, private, and donor sources and measures the “financial pulse”, but this is not a citizen-driven initiative, which is what CODE seeks to address by ensuring that government and citizens co-create transparency and accountability framework that allows for citizens to provide oversight functions on government expenditure using the Follow the Money model and also developing a GRESP- Gender Responsive Education Sector Plan.