Abstract
Bilateral educational diplomacy is frequently leveraged by developing countries to bridge local instructional gaps and drive capacity building. However, the exact institutional pathways through which external bilateral interventions interact with severely underfunded domestic educational systems remain underresearched. This study critically examined the dynamics of NigeriaUnited Kingdom bilateral relations and their subsequent impact on human capital development within Nigeria’s education sector. Grounded in Theodore Schultz’s Human Capital Theory, the study adopted a qualitative, triangulated research design. Primary data were gathered via semi-structured Key Informant Interviews (N = 17) across key diplomatic and educational institutions, including the Federal Ministry of Education, the British High Commission, and the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs complemented by process-tracing and qualitative content analysis of bilateral policy texts from 2015 to 2026. The findings revealed an institutional paradox which is that, while Anglo-Nigerian bilateral frameworks (manifested through Chevening fellowships, Commonwealth scholarships, and transnational education initiatives) demonstrated a strong positive relationship with high-level knowledge transfer and academic standardization, these gains are severely neutralized by domestic systemic decay. Specifically, the study established that the structural impact of bilateral educational gains is heavily constrained by an acute domestic funding deficit (with Nigeria’s education budget stagnating at 6.15% of national expenditure in 2025 and 2026) and a debilitating asymmetric “brain drain” of skilled academic and technical personnel to the UK. The study concluded that bilateral partnerships cannot act as an independent engine for national human capital formation without a resilient domestic framework. It recommended that the Federal Government of Nigeria shift its strategic approach from external scholarship dependency toward institutionalizing robust, local research and development frameworks, while enacting strategic reintegration policies to retain foreign-trained talents within productive domestic sectors.
Keywords: Bilateral Relations, Educational Diplomacy, Human Capital Development, Brain Drain, Anglo-Nigerian Relations, Educational Policy.
Author name(s):
Godiya Atsiya Pius ,
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Nasarawa State University, Keffi.
Shuaibu Umar Abdul,
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Nasarawa State University, Keffi.
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23158485
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.