Monrovia, August 21, 2026. Liberian President Joseph Nyuma Boakai has intensified one of the most ambitious social projects of his administration: returning 250,000 out of school children to the formal education system. On Friday, August 14, he convened for the first time the National Steering Committee of the « Back to My Classroom » campaign at the President’s Tea House inside the Executive Mansion in Monrovia. The meeting brought together senior government officials, county authorities, education stakeholders and development partners, including UNICEF.
The campaign responds to a troubling reality in the country. According to Amadou A. Cisse, UNICEF’s Deputy Representative for Programme in Liberia, nearly one in two Liberian children of school age is currently out of school. He described the government’s ambition to return 250,000 children to learning as both overwhelming and worthy of national commitment, and he praised President Boakai’s decision to personally chair the Steering Committee as a strong signal that education is being treated as a national priority.
Launched as a presidential initiative in August 2024, the « Back to My Classroom » campaign set a national target of returning 250,000 children to learning by 2029. The government has established a clear timeline: 80,000 children are to be reached in 2026 across seven pilot counties, followed by 60,000 in 2027, another 60,000 in 2028, and a final 50,000 in 2029.
Officials were careful to note that the August 14 meeting was not a relaunch of the program but rather an accountability checkpoint. Its purpose was to formalize responsibilities among the many agencies involved, assess how prepared individual counties are to implement the plan, strengthen political leadership at the local level, and clarify the financing needs as Liberia moves from planning into nationwide implementation.
Education Minister Dr. Jarso Maley Jallah underlined how complex the challenge remains. Getting a child through the school gate, she said, is only the first step. Children stay out of school for overlapping reasons that include poverty, missing identification documents, distance from school, disability, and age related barriers. In her view, no single ministry can solve this alone. Education, health, gender, local government and the country’s statistical agencies must all work around the same child, and the « Back to My Classroom » framework is designed to make that kind of multi agency response possible.
President Boakai himself sought to reframe expectations around the headline figure of 250,000, which he acknowledged can be confusing. He recalled asking his minister for clarity on whether the number referred only to children who had previously attended school and were returning, or to every child who would be entering the education system for the first time. Beyond that clarification, the president stressed what he considers the real measure of success: the campaign cannot be judged simply by enrollment numbers. Retention, he argued, matters just as much as getting children back into classrooms in the first place, since a child who returns to school only to drop out again represents a hollow victory.
Structural obstacles continue to weigh on school attendance, particularly for girls. Recent UNICEF data show that around 360,000 Liberian children attend schools with no access to water or functioning toilets. This shortfall disproportionately affects adolescent girls, many of whom miss school every month because their schools lack facilities suited to menstrual hygiene, a factor that drives both absenteeism and eventual dropout.
The campaign forms part of a broader set of education reforms undertaken since Boakai took office in 2024, including raised teacher salaries, lower registration fees, the integration of thousands of volunteer teachers into the civil service payroll, and the renovation of public schools across the country. Still, the scale of the goal, a quarter of a million children to be reintegrated within five years, combined with the need to sustain coordination across multiple ministries and international partners, makes this campaign one of the clearest tests yet of the Boakai administration’s ability to turn political commitments into measurable results on the ground.
