Over 1,680 Children Kidnapped in Nigeria Since 2014

More than 1,680 school-aged children have been abducted in Nigeria since the abduction of 276 Chibok girls by Boko Haram in 2014, according to a report released today by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS).

“In 2024 alone, Boko Haram abducted more than 400 people, mostly women and schoolchildren, from an IDP camp in Borno state,” the ISS said.

"What began as ideological kidnappings by extremists has turned into search-and-ransom operations by cross-border criminal groups," he added.

Also in 2024, the ISS warned, "militants from the al-Qaida-linked Ansarul Muslimina Fi Biladis Sudan kidnapped 287 students and staff from a school in Kaduna state, demanding a ransom of around 576,000 euros for their release." Gunmen kidnapped 17 students from a dormitory at an all-girls boarding school in Sokoto state, according to the ISS.

The attacks are carried out by networks of violent extremists and transnational criminal groups, says Fidel Amakye Owusu of the Conflict Research Consortium for Africa, quoted by ISS.

For political commentator and legal scholar Alfred Abhulimhen-Iyoha, also cited by ISS, kidnappings have become a profitable and low-risk crime. Perpetrators exploit weak state capacity and cross-border safe havens to kidnap students and teachers for ransom, the academic said.

According to the Institute for Security Studies, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu recognizes the seriousness of the problem, "emphasizing that poverty, frustration and economic hardship fuel kidnapping as a survival strategy and as a means of asserting power."

In his inauguration speech in May 2023, and again on the 10th anniversary of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, Tinubu promised, the ISS recalled, to increase the “cost” to criminals and pledging “to improve intelligence gathering, strengthen law enforcement and use sophisticated surveillance technologies to quickly arrest and prosecute the kidnappers, with harsher penalties.”

Recurring mass kidnappings have increased school absenteeism, with the United Nations Children's Fund reporting that in 2022, one in three Nigerian children were not attending school, the institute noted.

School kidnappings in a commercialized criminal industry are thus worsening Nigeria’s security crisis and destabilizing its education system, he concluded, noting that the Nigerian Government has implemented several strategies to combat school kidnappings, but “critics say these efforts are reactive, short-term and ineffective.”

In the ISS's assessment, rescue operations led by intelligence services have occasionally secured the release of students, but limited resources, lack of coordination and difficult terrain impede success, especially in remote areas where kidnappings are frequent.