Nigeria does not have an education funding problem. It has an education accountability problem disguised as a funding problem. Over the past decade, Nigeria has expanded education spending at a scale that, under ordinary institutional conditions, should have produced visible gains in literacy, numeracy, school quality, and system equity. Federal education allocations alone rose from approximately N602 billion in 2015 to over N3.5 trillion by 2025. State education budgets increased in parallel. In nominal terms, education has become one of the largest recurrent public expenditures in the Nigerian federation. Yet the results are starkly disconnected from the scale of investment. Fewer than 3 in 10 Nigerian children meet the minimum literacy or numeracy benchmarks in the early grades. Between 18 and 20 million children remain out of school, one of the highest figures globally. School infrastructure deficits persist. Teacher effectiveness remains uneven. Regional disparities in learning outcomes have widened rather than narrowed. This is not underfunding. This is systemic failure. The core argument of this paper is that Nigeria’s education budgets are not instruments of delivery; they are instruments of continuity. The budgeting system rewards allocation, disbursement, and administrative stability, not learning improvement. It sustains institutional routines rather than educational transformation. As a result, rising expenditure has not translated into proportional gains in human capital formation. Unless Nigeria fundamentally reforms how education budgets are designed, executed, and held accountable to outcomes, additional funding, however politically appealing, will continue to generate diminishing returns. In a period of fiscal compression, demographic pressure, …

Executive Summary Nigeria’s education system faces a growing digital literacy paradox. National internet usage exceeded 103 million users (45.5% penetration) by early 2024, alongside 164.4 million active internet subscriptions, yet these macro indicators conceal deep school-level, geographic, and pedagogical deficits. Household connectivity has expanded; classroom readiness has not. Nigeria possesses a coherent policy architecture—the National Policy on ICT in Education (NPICE) 2019, National Digital Literacy Framework (NDLF), 2023, and National Digital Learning Policy (NDLP), 2023—but implementation remains fragmented. Teacher capacity deficits, unreliable power and last-mile connectivity, non-ring-fenced financing, and weak monitoring and accountability have limited scale and sustainability. Pilot programmes, including UNICEF-supported initiatives connecting 1,027 schools and training 63,000 teachers, demonstrate feasibility but not national readiness. This policy brief finds that: (1) National connectivity statistics overstate school readiness; (2) Teacher digital competence and certified training capacity remain the single largest bottleneck to classroom integration; (3) Electrification and affordable last-mile broadband are preconditions for sustained use; and (4) Targeted investments combined with strong monitoring and evaluation (M&E) can rapidly increase effective reach. This brief recommends the following: (1) Rapidly scale pre-service and in-service digital pedagogy (targeted national teacher certification programmes); (2) Ring-fence blended federal–state funding for a five-year school connectivity and electrification plan; (3) Harmonise NPICE, NITDA’s Framework and the National Digital Learning Policy into time-bound key performance indicators (KPIs) – schools connected, teachers certified, devices per learner – and (4) Establish a joint FME–NITDA–UBEC public dashboard for real-time M&E. Leveraging available development finance and UNICEF implementation expertise can accelerate scale. If adopted, these measures should measurably raise teacher certification rates, increase the share of basic schools with functional digital access, reduce urban–rural learning gaps, and improve digital-skills outcomes for learners, enabling Nigeria to translate national connectivity gains into durable education transformation. Primary stakeholders for delivery include the Federal Ministry of Education, NITDA, UBEC, State Ministries of Education, REA/energy partners, UNICEF, and multilateral financiers.