The walk to the water is getting longer
By Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi
If you have been following my column, you would realise that I have been analysing the UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Report 2026 and in the forward, I read about a young climate activist from Pakistan named Zunaira who describes the floods that tore through her country in 2022, as something that took apart entire childhoods. Schools became shelters, families lost the spaces where their children had felt safe. She told world leaders this wasn’t a crisis she was imagining; it was one she was living.
I read that testimony and thought immediately of a different geography, but a familiar shape of loss.
A scene that repeats itself across northern Nigeria
Picture a compound in one of the drought-stretched towns of Nigeria’s far north, in a year when the rains have come late, or thin, or sets out with a jerrycan before the sun is high, walking further than she did the year before, because the closer wells have already failed. By the time she’s back, the morning is gone, and so, often, is the school day.
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This isn’t a single family’s misfortune. It’s the texture of what the report’s data describes in the abstract: a drought exposure score for Nigeria sitting at the absolute maximum, 10 out of 10. Behind that number is exactly this, a child whose day is reorganised around the search for water that used to be nearby.
The heat that doesn’t show up on the news
A few hundred kilometers away, in a classroom with a tin roof and no electricity for a fan, a different version of the same pressure is playing out. Nigeria’s extreme heat exposure score sits at 9.88 nearly the same ceiling as drought. Heat like that doesn’t make for dramatic footage the way a flood does. There’s no destroyed building, no visible disaster, there’s just a room too hot to concentrate in, a teacher fighting to hold a class’s attention through the early afternoon, and children whose test scores quietly slide without anyone quite naming why.
The report is specific about this mechanism: sustained heat exposure is linked to lower academic performance, shorter attention spans and rising anxiety in students, especially the youngest.
And then there’s the hazard with no single moment of crisis at all, the air itself. Nigeria’s air pollution exposure score is 9.97, among the highest measured anywhere in the report. There’s no flood line to point to, no storm to name. Just households cooking over open fires or polluting fuel sources, day after day, in rooms where small lungs are still developing. The report calls air pollution the single biggest environmental health risk children face globally. In Nigeria, that risk isn’t a distant abstraction. It’s close to the worst data records.
None of these scenes are quotes from a specific family, I want to be honest about that. They’re composites, built from what the report’s data says is statistically true across many households living through exactly these conditions but that’s precisely the point of writing it this way. A score of 9.97 doesn’t ask anything of you.
Zunaira ended her testimony with a line that has stayed with me since I read it: that what’s washed away in a crisis isn’t only physical, but something closer to childhood itself. Reading Nigeria’s numbers in this report, I don’t think she was only talking about her own country.
- Precious Ebere-Chinonso Obi, CEO of Do Take Action, is an independent consultant on edtech, climate change, public policy, and women’s procurement empowerment
