On 16 May 2026, Dr Jumai Ahmadu, president of the Helpline Social Support Initiative, used the International Day Of The Boy Child to call for targeted investment in boys, releasing school-based findings that show peer pressure and limited refusal skills are shaping daily decisions for large numbers of students.
Elizabethan H&H Foundation — through its Missing Curriculum and Uplifters’ Club initiatives — said it engaged more than 450 students in school-based sessions and analysed 300 student responses. The foundation reported that 249 of the 300 analysed students said peer influence affects their daily decisions. Sixty students said they struggle to say no because they do not know when or how to refuse; 67 said fear of losing friends makes it hard to refuse; 70 said the desire to belong makes saying no difficult; and 93 said fear of ridicule or being mocked undermines their ability to resist pressure. Only 10 students said they had no difficulty saying no.
In a separate engagement session the foundation analysed responses from 130 students and found that 79 reported being pressured into cybercrime-related activities.
Dr Jumai Ahmadu framed those figures around the day’s theme, “Flourish and Thrive: Investing in Boys for Stronger Families and Communities,” and said many boys lack consistent mentorship. She told attendees that “A secured future for the girl child can only be guaranteed when we intentionally raise responsible, emotionally balanced, respectful, and purpose-driven boys who will grow into supportive fathers, responsible husbands, compassionate leaders, and productive members of society,” and warned that “A thriving society cannot be built by empowering one gender while neglecting the other. The future of our families and communities depends greatly on how well we nurture our boys today.”
The International Day Of The Boy Child was founded in 2018 by Dr Jerome Teelucksingh, a sociology and history lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Observers marking the day this year pointed to wider international data on boys’ education, labour and health to underline why the school findings matter beyond the classrooms that hosted the foundation’s sessions.
Global figures cited alongside the school results include estimates that there are nearly one billion boys under the age of 15; UNESCO data showing that for every 100 women enrolled in tertiary education worldwide, only 88 men are enrolled; and that in 73 countries fewer boys than girls are registered in upper-secondary schools. UNESCO also found boys were more likely than girls to repeat primary grades in 130 out of 142 countries studied, and reading performance data from 57 countries showed 10-year-old boys consistently scoring below girls. The International Labour Organization reported that in 2020 boys accounted for 97 million of the world’s 160 million child labourers, and the World Health Organization identifies road traffic injuries as the leading cause of death among boys aged 15 to 19 globally.
Those international indicators create a tighter frame for the foundation’s school findings: low refusal skills and strong peer influence in classrooms can feed into educational underachievement, risky online behaviour and early entry into harmful labour or dangerous activities. The foundation’s figures are drawn from school-based field engagements, not from a national survey, and organisers acknowledge the sessions cannot by themselves quantify the problem across an entire country. Still, the pattern inside the classrooms — only 10 students reporting no difficulty saying no — underscores a gap between concern and effective programming.
The tension, advocates said, is simple but stark: public discussion and celebratory observances now recognise boys’ vulnerabilities, yet the data points to entrenched problems in schooling, mentorship and safety that will not be fixed by rhetoric alone. Dr Ahmadu and the foundation urged deliberate investment in mentorship, emotional-support systems and value-based guidance for boys to reduce pressure-driven harms and to strengthen families and communities.
On a day founded to draw attention to boys’ issues, the combined message from school sessions and international data was blunt: without sustained, measurable investment in the social and educational environments that shape boys, outcomes for boys and girls alike will be harder to secure. “A secured future for the girl child can only be guaranteed when we intentionally raise responsible, emotionally balanced, respectful, and purpose-driven boys who will grow into supportive fathers, responsible husbands, compassionate leaders, and productive members of society,” Dr Ahmadu said, returning the argument to the human consequences behind the numbers.
