How Climate Change Is Pushing Adamawa’s Children Out of School and Into Trash Heaps

Habizu is twelve years old. Most mornings, while children his age settle into classroom benches somewhere in Nigeria, he is at the Hayin Gada dumpsite, barefoot, sorting through heaps of discarded bottles and scrap metal with his bare hands. His parents are in Bauchi. He has not been inside a school in longer than he can clearly remember. He is not there by choice. He is there because his family needs to eat.

At Hayin Gada, a community in Adamawa State, the dumpsite has quietly become the place where poverty announces itself most plainly. Boys and girls, some too young for secondary school, move through the waste each day under no supervision except necessity. A week’s hard work fills one net of plastic bottles. The going price is ₦70. Buyers often pay ₦50.

This is what climate change looks like when it lands on the poorest families in northeast Nigeria, not satellite images of retreating forests, not abstract policy language, but a barefoot twelve-year-old boy who has traded his right to an education for the right to eat.

Adamawa State is caught in a triple crisis. Communal clashes, the lingering threat of insurgent activity, and an accelerating climate emergency are compressing the options available to ordinary families at the same time. Of the three, climate change receives the least attention as a driver of poverty, even as its effects on harvests, livelihoods, and community stability grow more visible every season.

The Children the Economy Left Behind

Abdullahi does not know his exact age. He knows his father was a farmer before the floods came and changed everything. “My father is a farmer, but things changed when flood affected our village, and from then, we have been suffering,” he said. “Picking up bottles from the trash and selling them is what I do as my source of livelihood.”

He has done the arithmetic many times. It takes roughly one week to fill a single net of collected plastic bottles. The posted rate is ₦70 per net. Then the buyers arrive and the negotiation begins from a position where Abdullahi holds no leverage at all. “When the buyers come, they will reduce the amount sometimes to ₦50,” he said. “But I have no option. I need to buy food, wear clothes and also bath.”

Habizu’s account carries the same flat resignation. “My daily work is to pick iron and bottles and sell them to make money,” he said. “I want to buy Sallah clothes. My parents live in Bauchi. I don’t attend school; this is what I do to earn my living.” The request is small: festival clothes, the kind of thing any child ought to want without it depending on a week of sorting waste in bare feet. What neither boy has is the choice to want something larger.

The path that brought them to Hayin Gada follows a pattern that is repeating itself across rural Adamawa. A flood season destroys crops. Stored grain runs out before the next harvest. Livestock die. Families that depended on farming or fishing for income lose both at once, and children become the fallback earners because they are available and because the formal support systems that should cushion this kind of shock are either absent or unreachable.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the Lake Chad Basin, which includes Adamawa’s broader ecological zone, is among the most climate-stressed regions in Africa, with smallholder farmers and fishing communities identified as the most exposed category. Desertification is moving southward. Rainfall patterns have become unreliable. The agricultural seasons that families structured their entire economic lives around are no longer predictable in the way they once were.

What the Experts Are Seeing on the Ground

Ambassador Richard Eyonkume has spent years watching climate change do its slow, compounding work on Nigerian communities. He is the Founder and President of a national NGO known as Ambassadors of Dialogue, Climate and Reinterpretation and also serves as Registrar of the Institute of Climate Smart Research and Policy Advocacy. His language about Adamawa is not theoretical.

“Climate change affects people, animals and natural resources,” he said. “Currently in Adamawa State, heat waves are one of the major causes of climate change which is affecting the people, leading to food insecurity where farmers no longer farm like before due to drought and fishermen find it difficult; it is causing much food insufficiency.”

He draws the line from environmental stress to social breakdown with equal directness. “Natural disasters, floods and the environment are drastically affected by climate change and the spread of diseases such as malaria and cholera, which leads to loss of livelihood,” he said. The connection he makes to communal violence is one that security analysts have been slower to acknowledge fully. “Communal clash is a result of climate change occurring in the community due to drought,” Ambassador Eyonkume said. “This act also causes poverty; that is why most children in the local communities succumb to picking waste products rather than valuing education due to poverty.”

His position sits within a growing international research consensus. A 2023 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified resource scarcity driven by environmental degradation as a key driver of intercommunal conflict in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, making climate not simply a background condition but an active cause of the instability Adamawa communities are already living with.

Ambassador Eyonkume is careful not to leave the conversation at diagnosis alone. On the informal waste economy that has drawn children like Habizu and Abdullahi, his position is measured rather than simply condemning. “Waste has become wealth; people go and pick waste, sell it and generate income,” he said. “But it’s unfortunate to see children who are supposed to be in school picking waste. They may sell it, but advisably, they should go to school first; after their school hours, they should come back and pick up the waste.”

He goes further, arguing that the waste economy should be made safer and more productive rather than simply banned. “They should be taught on how to separate the waste so that interacting with it doesn’t become a hazard to their health, though it’s a means of survival,” he said. “Parents should look for refining companies and send their children there to learn professionally how to convert waste into products for income generation.”

His message to parents points toward a resource that already exists but is being underused at scale. “I encourage parents and guardians to adopt the policy of free education which the state has provided for the children and enrol their children,” he said. “Knowledge is important.” On government’s responsibilities, he is equally specific. “The government has an important role to play by providing trash bins where waste can be kept carefully and separating it in order to keep the environment clean and safe,” he said. On climate adaptation at the household level, he pointed toward accessible, practical measures. “The measures that should be taken are for the people to adopt renewable energy, such as solar, and have enough water to drink. Parents should send their children to school.”

A System That Is Not Catching These Children

The children at Hayin Gada did not create the conditions of their own abandonment. Their parents did not choose flooding or drought. The communities they live in did not invite the desertification creeping down from the Sahel or the heat seasons that are making agricultural calendars unreliable.

What has failed them is a web of systems that were supposed to cushion exactly this kind of shock. Free basic education exists as state policy, but enrolment depends on families having enough food security to send children to school rather than deploy them as earners. Climate adaptation investment, substantial at the federal level on paper, has not visibly reached the communities where children are already working dumpsites. Waste management infrastructure remains absent in the local government areas most affected.

Nigeria’s federal government has made climate financing commitments under the Paris Agreement and its 2021 Nationally Determined Contributions, including targets for renewable energy adoption and agricultural resilience, but implementation gaps at the state and local government levels remain wide and largely unmonitored. The distance between what is pledged in policy documents and what exists at a dumpsite in Hayin Gada is the distance that children like Habizu and Abdullahi are falling through every day.

The Adamawa State Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Education did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.

Habizu wants Sallah clothes. It is a small and entirely reasonable wish, the kind that any child deserves to hold without it depending on a week of sorting glass and rusted metal from a trash heap in bare feet.

What he does not have, and what no intervention has yet given him, is the choice to want something beyond survival. A classroom. A teacher. A morning that begins somewhere other than a dumpsite.

Ambassador Eyonkume put the obligation plainly: “Knowledge is important.” It is. But knowledge requires safety, food, and a family that has not been stripped of income by floods it did not cause and drought it cannot control. Until the government connects its climate commitments to the communities bearing the cost, the children of Hayin Gada will keep paying with their childhoods, one ₦50 bottle net at a time.