Atiku’s AUN at 20: How a University in Yola Became a Symbol of Education, Peace and Hope in Northern Nigeria

By Margee Ensign

I have had the challenge and privilege of leading universities on three continents: Africa, North America, and, most recently, Europe, at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG). But I will never forget in a hurry my experiences at the American University of Nigeria, Yola.

The AUN, where I was president from 2010 to 2017 and then again from 2021 to 2022, is explicit about its mission to be “Africa’s development university” and to ensure that the local community and region, much of which is impoverished, benefit from university programs and projects.

At AUN, the mission necessarily drove how we developed curricula, recruited students and faculty, and explained ourselves not only to students and parents but also to our skeptical and sometimes hostile host societies, which were unclear about and at times suspicious of the purpose of an American education.

At AUN, for several years, our very survival depended on believing in, telling, and living a coherent and compelling story. As we faced threats from Boko Haram, a violent Islamist insurgent group whose Hausa name translates loosely as “Western education is evil,” the mutually supportive and trusting relationship we developed with our local community kept us safe and allowed us to pursue our development mission.

AUN was only six years old when I became president there. Situated in rural, desperately impoverished, largely Muslim northeastern Nigeria, AUN might not have survived financially or physically if we had not established a strong community network before the crisis began. We also took the precaution of hiring and training our own armed security force of more than six hundred people.

In 2012, when the Nigerian government removed fuel subsidies and nationwide strikes broke out, AUN spearheaded the creation of the Adamawa Peace Initiative (API), bringing together local Muslim and Christian leaders, businesspeople, and youth leaders for the first time.

We agreed on a set of values and goals that guided our work for five years:

• Youth must be positively engaged.
• Religion is an instrument of peace.
• Women are the center of development.
• Education is the foundation of society.

We agreed that these community leaders best understood the needs of our poor community. Based on their concerns, our first project focused on vulnerable youth.

Through the creation of the Feed and Read programme, we worked to reduce hunger and increase literacy among children on the streets (the Almajiri), who were vulnerable to recruitment by Boko Haram. We hired local women to cook daily meals, while our students taught the children literacy and numeracy.

We also established the Peace Through Sports programme, which brought together young people from different cultural and religious backgrounds through football. The Technology-Enhanced Learning for All (TELA) initiative helped teach more than twenty thousand internally displaced children how to read through a radio education programme developed from an AUN media class.

These efforts were integrated into community-based university development courses where students, faculty and staff identified local challenges — including hunger, illiteracy, environmental degradation and poverty — and developed practical solutions.

Additionally, when API members informed us that local hospitals had unreliable internet services and needed access to medical research, AUN launched the Library on a Flash Drive programme, where librarians uploaded important articles and books onto flash drives and distributed them to hospitals and clinics across the region.

The American University of Nigeria also granted scholarships to twenty-one young women who escaped Boko Haram militants.

Even before Boko Haram intensified its attacks through bombings and kidnappings, AUN had built strong and trusting relationships with local leaders. They were the ones who alerted us about the growing threat.

I will never forget the call in the fall of 2014 from the Emir of Mubi: “Margee, can you please come and bring the API members with you?”

We travelled together by bus and arrived to find a room filled with about five hundred women and girls.

I asked our translator, “Where are the boys and men?”

One of the women replied, “Boko Haram killed our husbands and kidnapped our boys.”

This moment served as an early warning that allowed us to prepare for what was coming. On the journey home, Imam Dauda Bello, a prominent member of API, said to me: “We must be obsessed with peace.”

And we were, for years.

When nearly 300,000 refugees later poured into Yola to escape Boko Haram’s destruction, we had strong relationships and an institutional structure that enabled us to feed and support displaced families. When a nearby university was destroyed, AUN opened its classrooms and residence halls to students so they could complete their academic year.

At all the universities I have led — but especially in Nigeria — every department developed community-based projects as part of the curriculum. These included entrepreneurship programmes, social entrepreneurship courses mainly for women, and sustainable agriculture initiatives for farmers.

Every afternoon after classes, AUN students, faculty and staff participated in what we called “the feeding,” distributing food to approximately fifty thousand people daily.

Today, far away from Yola in northern Nigeria, I still remember the words of one of my students from Chibok who was rescued from Boko Haram captivity and brought to AUN.

Upon graduation, she said words that I carry with me every day:

“Education gives me the wings to fly, the power to fight, and the voice to speak.”

Margee Ensign, a former President of the American University of Nigeria, Yola, is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College, USA.