August 27 will mark 500 days since 276 schoolgirls were abducted from the Nigerian village of Chibok. Many are still missing.

Last April, members of the militant group, Boko Haram, entered the Government Secondary School in the predominantly Christian town of Chibok in Borno State. They kidnapped the 16-18 year old schoolgirls to make a statement about their opposition to “western style education.” Girls, the group believes, should not be educated.

The event itself, along with the lack of response from the authorities, resulted in rightly outraged Nigerians. Families and friends of the kidnapped girls unwaveringly demanded that action be taken to “bring back their girls.”

It wasn’t until Ibrahim M. Abdullahi, a lawyer in Abuja, sent the first tweet using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, that the social media campaign #BringBackOurGirls began.

In less than three weeks, the hashtag had been used over 1 million times on social media. The hashtag spread internationally, attracting support from celebrities and prominent public figures, including Pakistani Education Activist Malala Yousafzai, First Lady Michelle Obama, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Ranging from famous celebrities to average citizens, all showed their support and recognition of such a horrible event. However, the conversation on social media never resulted in any political action, only emphasizing a disconnect “between public support and political will that often arises in international conflict,” media experts said.

"World leaders from countries including the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, Canada and Israel offered assistance to Nigeria to free the schoolgirls, but to date no diplomatic or military action has secured their release," reported Al Jazeera.

Over the course of the past year, some of the girls have managed to escape their captors, but hundreds of the girls remain missing, and this issue continues to grow larger. Now, young men and boys have also been kidnapped by the group, or have been killed for resisting.

In interviews, survivors who've fled the militant group describe how some women were forced into marriage and sexual slavery. Children were malnourished and some were "just little skeletal bodies with flaps of skin that make them look like old people," one woman described in an interview with BBC.

Now, after over a year, the #BringBackOurGirls campaign has slowly lost momentum -everywhere, that is, except Nigeria.

Since the girls’ abduction, the world has become preoccupied with other global events, but Nigeria’s concern for the Chibok girls remains unaltered. Bring Back Our Girls campaigners in Nigeria continue to meet daily, and they organized a Global Week of Action, with this year's being August 21-27.

It's been 500 days, but that doesn't mean the 276 girls and other victims should be forgotten.