Our Future Under Attack is an education and art project that points to the future of children in Nigeria under attack - from school attacks, the digital divide in the education system and the issue of rape and early child marriage that truncates the education of girls.
It’s an advocacy piece developed by a group of young artists from Nigeria that calls on government and leaders to take urgent action to save education which is the pathway to the future of children from further attacks.
Project by Pelumi Adekoya, Pius Divine, Adebayo Mubarak and Gajilo Michael as part of our Youth Mediathon.
Gajilo Michael, 15
"Today, what we have is a divided class. With access to digital learning tools, we now have a global classroom, but unfortunately, our classrooms are now divided between students with access and those without access and the majority of us, who fall under the category of those without access to digital learning platforms.
COVID-19 showed us how divided our classrooms have become. We will be far left behind if the government and our leaders don’t bridge the divide urgently."
Pelumi Adekoya, 18
"Rape is one of the worse things that can happen to a girl. This artwork shows how rape can affect the education of a girl."
Pius Divine, 15
"I titled this artwork ‘The great loss.’ I created this piece with charcoal on paper to illustrate how a hand holding a gun is tearing pages off our book. The message is simple: ‘the attacks on schools is taking our education backwards and destroying education.'
School attacks have become one of our biggest problems in Nigeria. If the hands tearing off the pages of our books is not stopped, we may not have any book left for us to read."
Adebayo Mubarak, 13
"This artwork is called 'The Dream'. This shows our hope and how we wish our classrooms to be. If you look closely, you will notice that a young girl is learning in a classroom that is highly digitized, and on the her shirt there is a map of Nigeria.
This is simply a representation of our dream!"
