Every organisation has a first day in the field. Ours was 14 July 2026, in a classroom at Junior Secondary School (JSS) Kpaduma, Abuja.
We spent an hour with 20 students from JSS2, aged 13 to 15. The subject was the basics of climate — what is actually happening in our atmosphere and why it matters where they live — and, just as importantly, the simple action steps ordinary people can take to reduce the imbalance we are all contributing to.
Why we started in a classroom
Nigeria’s energy transition will be carried out by people who are in secondary school today. They will be its technicians, its farmers, its entrepreneurs, and its policymakers. Most of them are currently getting little or no structured education about energy or climate at all.
That gap is the reason our schools programme exists, and it is why we chose a classroom for our first activity rather than a conference room. Climate change is usually presented to Nigerian teenagers, when it is presented at all, as something distant and abstract: melting ice, foreign summits, other people’s weather. It is neither distant nor abstract. It is their harvests, their water, their air, and their working lives.
What we covered
We kept the hour deliberately practical. The aim was not to hand over a vocabulary list but to leave the room with two things intact: an accurate picture of what is happening to the atmosphere, and the understanding that individual action is neither pointless nor complicated.
Sessions like this are designed to be participatory rather than a lecture in the strict sense, and adapted to the age group in front of us. Thirteen to fifteen is a good age to meet this subject. Old enough to follow the science, young enough that career directions are still wide open.
What the students told us
The most useful feedback we received came from a student who told us afterwards that they had enjoyed the lecture and learnt a lot of new things, because the concepts had been explained clearly.
We are recording that comment here because it is precisely the thing we were testing. The barrier was never that young Nigerians are indifferent to climate and energy. The barrier is that the subject is rarely offered to them in a form built for them. Explain it clearly, in their context, and the interest is already there waiting.
What happens next
Two invitations came out of the visit. The school asked the CELI team back for its graduation the following week, and asked us to return to present to more classes when school resumes in September.
We take both as the most honest measure of whether an hour was worth anyone’s time: whether they want you back. We are now building a pipeline of schools for the coming terms and refining the session materials with each delivery, and we will keep reporting what we do, including what we would change.
You can read more about the programme, including how we measure it, on the Climate & Energy Education in Schools project page.
Work with us
If you lead a school that would like to host a session, if you teach and want to help us shape the materials, or if you want to fund the expansion of this programme to more schools and states, write to us at info@celi.org.ng.