Armed Groups Recruited Over 1,100 Children in Nigeria’s North-East in 2024
Two armed groups operating in Nigeria’s North-East recruited more than 1,120 children as fighters and sex slaves in 2024, according to UNICEF. The figure, disclosed on Wednesday in Maiduguri to mark the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers, breaks down to 525 boys and 595 girls taken across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states. These numbers alone tell the scale of the problem, and that progress, however real, remains achingly slow.
UNICEF Child Protection Manager Tarek Akkad made the disclosure, citing the UN Secretary-General’s report on children and armed conflict. He described the recruitment and use of children in active conflict as a grave violation of international law, and one of the most persistent abuses the world’s armed groups continue to inflict on the young. The North-East has endured more than a decade of insurgency, and children remain among its most exploited victims. Girls, who outnumber boys in this year’s figures, face a particular cruelty: many are taken not to fight but to serve.
The three states affected sit at the heart of Nigeria’s long insurgency belt. Borno remains the historic stronghold of the conflict, with Adamawa and Yobe serving as spillover zones where armed groups have expanded their reach and replenished their ranks with the most defenceless recruits available. The pattern is not new. What is sobering is that it continues at this volume despite years of military campaigns, international attention, and humanitarian intervention. Numbers above a thousand in a single year are not a sign of a crisis winding down.
Akkad’s call to action was pointed. He urged Nigeria and other affected states to adopt the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a legal instrument that sets binding limits on the involvement of children in armed conflict. He also pressed governments, civil society groups, and international bodies to sharpen both prevention efforts and accountability measures. Accountability is the harder ask. Armed groups rarely face consequences proportionate to the harm they cause, and impunity has a way of feeding the next round of recruitment.
On the question of how to treat children already caught up with these groups, Akkad was clear: they are victims first. He said children associated with armed groups should be handed over to civilian child protection authorities rather than processed through security or military channels. That distinction matters enormously in practice. A child treated as a combatant gets a different kind of justice, and usually a worse one, than a child treated as someone who was taken, coerced, or manipulated into a role they did not choose.
UNICEF and its development partners have helped some affected children recover and rebuild their lives, Akkad noted. Reintegration programmes exist and, where properly funded and run, they work. But they work slowly, and they work for far fewer children than the ones who need them. For every child who passes through a formal recovery programme, many others remain in the bush, in captivity, in communities too fragile or too underfunded to offer much help. The gap between what is needed and what is available remains wide.
Nigeria marks Red Alert Day each year, but marking a day is not a policy. The 1,120 figure for 2024 will not shrink on its own. It will shrink when armed groups face real costs for recruitment, when border and community protection is strong enough to make abduction harder, and when the Nigerian state invests seriously in the welfare of the children it has most damaged. Until then, the numbers will keep coming, and they will keep demanding more than a press conference.