North Korea’s philosophy of Human Capacity Development, also known as Juche philosophy, which promotes self-reliance posits that “man is the master of his own destiny and also decides everything”. This places human agency at the centre of all developments, positive or negative, but within the framework of the state, the protector. 

After more than a decade of insurgency that destroyed schools, displaced millions, and collapsed local economies in Borno, Adamawa, Yobe and neighbouring states, the North-east zone cannot afford education that stops at textbooks.

Beyond rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, communities need to endure recurring shocks like food insecurity and climate change. Skills in small business, solar energy, water management, and conflict mediation are also required. They give youth and women alternatives to depending on government and donors while assisting to stem vulnerability to extremism.

You can rebuild roads and clinics, but without people equipped to run them, the North-east will keep cycling through crisis and recovery.

If physical capital is machines and buildings, human capital is the people who know how to use them well and invent better ones. To this end, education, mass organisations, and workplace mobilisation are pivots upon which societies run and they are practices Juche philosophy reinforces and promotes. It is a sort of training that integrates technical instruction with political mobilisation to ensure alignment between skills acquisition and state purpose.

As most market economies frame human capacity development around individual skill sets, employability, and economic productivity, North Korea’s model inverts the priority that individual’s development is subordinate to political objectives, and success is measured by contribution to state sovereignty and ideological cohesion, not by personal income gain at the expense of the people and the state or consumer choice.

This approach produces high alignment between individual activity and state goals, and emphasises resilience through self-reliance and sufficiency. It de-emphasises specialisation for global markets and individual entrepreneurship as personal gains only without driving collective development and advancement.

As rebuilding efforts continue across Nigeria’s North-east, there is the need for a shift from conventional schooling to “functional education,” as skills-based learning is now central to not only the zone’s recovery, persistence, and long-term survival, it is the basis of national development and poverty reduction globally.  

With thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) returning home, the immediate priority is income and infrastructure. But functional education trains masons, health workers, and farmers in climate-smart techniques to rebuild communities and generate income faster. If a generation grows up without relevant skills, the zone not only risks losing its human capital and the ability to sustain itself, it makes staying in the North-east difficult as most people will prefer emigration to staying as a result of dwindling skill sets that will catalyse collective prosperity.

Skills required to make the North-east a viable place to live and do business include practical skills, livelihood-driven learning: vocational training, agricultural value chain development, digital skills, entrepreneurship, health services, and education.

Fourteen years after the insurgency began, the education system in the North-east states remains under severe strain. According to UNICEF, “2 million children in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe are currently out of school. The 2025 Joint Education Needs Assessment also puts the figure at an estimated two million across the zone.

The situation is worse for displaced children as 56 per cent of displaced children do not attend school, and UNICEF notes that more than half of all displaced children in the North-east are out of school and even those in classrooms are struggling. UNICEF revealed in May 2025 that 72% of primary school leavers in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe cannot read simple texts and only 58% transition to secondary school. Just 29% of schools have teachers who meet minimum qualification standards.

At the national level, 41 per cent of children aged 5-14 in the North-east and North-west are out of school, with Northern Nigeria accounting for 80% of Nigeria’s 20 million out-of-school children despite collective efforts at rebuilding destroyed schools and the rise of mega schools. This implies that the problems are beyond rebuilding of schools to issues around quality of teachers and the curriculum being taught in most of these schools. So, with an estimated 2 million children out of school in this zone another round of poverty that may feed into the current level of deprivation that pervaded the  before insurgency has already been made possible. This is where skills-based learning comes in. Once it has been made the foundation of the rebuilding process, it automatically becomes central to the zone’s recovery, persistence, and survival as modern education without functional education that identifies and nurtures talents and creativity makes it harder to break this cycle of poverty and instability.

Government and development partners have started aligning with this thinking through TVET programmes, integration of Tsangaya schools, and accelerated learning for out-of-school children. The focus is moving from just enrollment numbers to employability and relevance.

However, challenges remain as destroyed infrastructure, teacher shortages, cultural barriers to girls’ education, and a curriculum that often does not match local and international job markets persist. For functional education to be truly “central’, government at all levels in the North-east must link every school to a trade: agriculture, ICT, or technical skills using community institutions like markets and religious centres as learning hubs, embedding peace and civic education to address drivers of conflict while partnering with businesses to guarantee jobs for graduates.

Countries, companies, and communities invest in human capital because it drives productivity. A healthier, better-educated workforce creates more innovation, earns more, and needs less emergency support. The opposite is also true. When kids grow up without education, sanitation, or healthcare as earlier indicated, if human capital doesn’t develop that turns into lost GDP, higher health costs, bigger social risks, poverty trap, and circles of violence. Lack of quality education not only in the North-east but also any part of the world will hit human capacity development hard. The zone already faces high poverty, displacement, and low skills which all limit access to better-paying jobs in agriculture value chains, SMEs, construction, and the global digital economy.

Though, the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) recently only published its 2026 overall national rate results but, detailed performance by region/state usually comes later in WAEC’s statistical bulletin, or sometimes individual states announce their own.

Borno’s recent ₦565.7 million payment for 28,789 students, on the other hand; shows government’s effort, but if learning quality doesn’t improve, that investment won’t translate to graduates who can drive businesses or innovation. Brain drain gets worse in this circumstance. The few who get quality education often leave for places of immense opportunities like Lagos, Abuja, or abroad instead of creating such opportunities themselves, so the zone loses its talents. And when schools are under-resourced, overcrowded, or unsafe students miss foundational literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking which are key components to national and sub-national development and innovative thinking. 

The North-east has already dealt with 10+ years of insurgency that destroyed schools, displaced teachers, and interrupted learning. So, a lack of quality and functional education before the insurgency means the zone is trying to rebuild human capacity from a deeper deficit than other zones.

It’s important to note at this juncture that children denied education, clean water, and healthcare are more than a moral failure. They represent a threat to public health, to the economy, to public order, and to security. When poverty and exclusion go unchecked, using quality and functional education that guarantees equal access as leverage, poverty, deprivation, extremism, and crime fill the gap. Let’s be clear: the children are not the problem. The problem is the systems society didn’t build to protect, educate, and give them hope. Thus, without adequate human capital, the recovery, persistence, and survival of the North-east will not be possible because no society ever buys development with money. Development is created and it is created by the people not by wealth.

…Hamisu, Leader, Independent Researchers, writes from Abuja via 

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