● Enrols 135 institutions for certificate verification
● Ekiti, Bayero Universities, Auchi Poly lead national digital submission

Early reports from the newly established national education record digitisation programme under the auspices of the Nigeria Education Repository and Databank (NERD) have shown that Nigerian students successfully uploaded and curated over 10,000 project entries in the first 3 weeks since the programme began.

The figure climbed to over 11,000 submissions by this weekend, with 158 post-graduate entries from a total of 242 active institutions, while over 40,000 students have been successfully enrolled into the NERD system.

The NERD programme, unveiled to Nigerians by Dr Tunji Alausa, the Minister of Education, has also onboarded 135 tertiary institutions for academic credential verification purposes as of press time.

From the live information analytics available on the NERD portal, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti leads with a total of 990 curated entries, followed by Bayero University Kano, with a total submission of 611 as of press time.

Auchi Polytechnic, Edo State, ranks third on the list of highest early enrolment figures with a total student project entry of 532.

They are followed closely by Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma Edo State (493), Osun State Polytechnic Iree, Osun State (479), the University of Ilorin Kwara State (469), Bamidele Olumilua University of Education, Science and Technology Ikere Ekiti (462), Kaduna Polytechnic (379), the University of Benin Edo State (374) and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State, with 282 entries to make the list of 10 highest student submissions at the end of the first one month of the programme.

Science and Innovation, with entries of 5,952, lead the national students’ industry preference or knowledge pillars, and the figure is not derived from Science and Engineering students alone, as students from Arts and Social Science backgrounds were discovered to be pursuing research topics around innovation and similar cutting-edge thematic trends.

Other higher industry thematic preferences are Multidisciplinary 2,091, Engineering and Technology 1,958, Tourism and Entertainment 1,392, Infrastructure and Sustainable Development 952, while Humanities has 783 submissions.

The majority of the entries are accompanied by the names of the student, their supervisors and heads of departments.

Haula Galadima, NERD’s spokesperson, clarified that one of the strategic objectives of the Federal Government for the thesis digitisation, classification, and archiving scheme was to enhance the quality of supervision without directly meddling in the process.

She stated that lecturers across Nigerian institutions were likely to be more thorough with their supervisory work if they were aware that their names would accompany those works and would be available to or be seen by other researchers, captains of industry and entrepreneurs globally.

She also stated that “NERD now has precision metrics to track earned allowances computation in any institution in Nigeria, and this will help the government to see the quantum of supervisory works being done by our lecturers outside their rigorous class teaching schedules, field, or laboratory work.”

The report also indicates that a slightly higher number of female students successfully enrolled and submitted ahead of their male counterparts, with Male: 4,995 to Female: 6,142.

The information analytics can presently be monitored by clicking Data Analytics or Open Platform on the NERD portal at https://esmat.ned.gov.ng.

For the first time since independence, Nigeria, under the Tinubu-led administration, took a revolutionary decision to digitise, classify, and organise the thousands of yearly research outputs being produced in the nation’s higher institutions.

The goal is to improve the quality of those works, organise and curate them in a location where they can be easily accessed by the industry, as well as make them available to other researchers who can improve upon them for overall national growth and development as a net contributor to global knowledge in a measurable and accountable manner.

Basically, the Federal Government intends to leverage NERD as a strategic tool to promote institutional quality upgrade without directly getting involved or meddling in the institutional processes.

Under the NERD regulation, all academic outputs are to be deposited in the national databank regardless of institution type or proprietorship and regardless of the level of study, whether undergraduate or postgraduate.

Even though NERD has asked NYSC to excuse undergraduates whose process of clearance began in their respective schools before the October 6 enforcement date from the mandatory NERD compliance clearance requirement, since they fall in the transition period, undergraduate students across the nation’s institutions have continued to upload their academic works onto the NERD platform on an hourly basis.

The student’s national thesis digitisation project is one of the key services of the Nigerian Education Repository and Databank.

Other mandates of NERD are the ongoing National Academic Credential Verification scheme targeted at eliminating qualification fraud in the public and private sectors of Nigeria, as well as the National Students’ Clearing House scheme aimed at serving as the central record keeper post-admission across all institutions.