Nigeria’s basic education system is straining under pressures that threaten to compromise the country’s demographic promise. The numbers are unflinching: millions of children excluded from school, millions more in school but not learning, an underfunded system buckling under persistent insecurity, and a teacher pipeline thinning just when national demographics demand its expansion. Yet scattered across this landscape of distress are pockets of reform that demonstrate how rapidly outcomes can improve when policy ambition, financial discipline and institutional execution align.