Nigeria’s push to build a national digital infrastructure for education records and quality assurance in higher institutions has recorded a major milestone, with the Nigeria Education Repository and Databank (NERD) surpassing 400,000 digitised theses and dissertations.
Officials and education stakeholders see the achievement as an important step towards preserving the country’s intellectual output and building a national database for the instant validation of academic credentials.
Data from the repository, esmat.ned.gov.ng, showed that by early September 2026, the platform had accumulated over 400,000 visible academic submissions from universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, colleges of education, and other post-secondary institutions across the country.
That figure had exceeded 410,000 as of press time.
Likewise, the National Credential Verification Service’s component of NERD has verified more than 115,000 academic credentials and allocated these National Credential Numbers (NCN), fulfilling a critical mandate of NERD for the authentication, preservation, and digital warehousing of academic qualifications.
“The development represents one of the measurable outcomes of the Federal Government’s Renewed Hope Agenda and its ongoing education digitisation programme under President Bola Tinubu, that placed technology, data and institutional accountability at the centre of reforms in the education sector.”
Under the supervision of the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, NERD has grown into an increasingly broad national infrastructure connecting institutions, students, academic works, workers, and credentials within a common digital environment.
Figures on the NERD platform show that NERD has recorded 907 enrolled institutions, of which 629 are active, demonstrating the widening reach of the national repository across different categories of post-secondary education.
The latest institutional breakdown displayed by the platform includes 259 universities, 163 polytechnics, 179 monotechnics, 178 colleges of education and 130 institutions classified under other categories.
Beyond institutions themselves, the digital network now covers 2,020 enrolled faculties, with 1,620 recording visible submissions, while 5,353 of 9,626 enrolled departments have visible academic works on the repository.
The figures suggest that the challenge is gradually shifting from simply bringing institutions onto the national platform to deepening participation within individual faculties and departments.
The figure places the University of Benin and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, at the head of a tightly packed group of institutions, followed by Ekiti State University, the University of Calabar and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, among other leading contributors.
Institutions such as Kwara State Polytechnic, Kaduna Polytechnic, Auchi Polytechnic, Federal Polytechnic Nasarawa and Federal Polytechnic Nekede feature prominently among institutions contributing substantial volumes of student academic works.
At faculty level, the Faculty of Education at Ahmadu Bello University leads the current chart, while Education at Ekiti State University and Science and Technology at Kaduna Polytechnic are also among the leading contributors.
The departmental statistics reveal an even more diverse picture. Mass Communication and Public Administration departments belonging to several polytechnics dominate some of the highest positions, illustrating that Nigeria’s growing digital research collection is not being driven exclusively by the traditional university system.
The data also offer a glimpse into the composition of the material being preserved.
Student projects overwhelmingly constitute the largest category of visible academic works, with theses, dissertations, seminar papers, and other research outputs making up smaller portions of the repository.
The Tinubu administration’s establishment of NERD represents an attempt to reverse that pattern by creating a structured national layer through which the country’s academic output can be verified, preserved, indexed and progressively made discoverable.
Fresh statistics from NERD also reveal an interesting dimension to Nigeria’s emerging academic knowledge base: female students currently account for substantially more of the visible research submissions than their male counterparts.
Of the records categorised by sex in the visible dataset, 228,347 submissions were attributed to female students, compared with 181,536 for male students, while 77 records were not categorised.
The pattern broadly reflects the platform’s overall student enrolment figures. NERD’s latest statistics show 248,284 enrolled female students, against 197,526 males.
The age profile provides another indication of the demographic character of the emerging repository. The largest concentration of final-year or graduating students falls within the 25–29 age bracket, followed by those aged 20–24, with considerably smaller numbers in the older age categories.
“Taken together, the figures provide a growing body of national-level data that could eventually help government, institutions and researchers better understand participation patterns within Nigeria’s tertiary education system.
“The academic credential verification component of NERD gives the initiative a second strategic dimension.
“With more than 115,000 academic credentials already verified and allocated unique National Credential Numbers (NCNs), the emerging infrastructure provides a common national framework for uniquely identifying, referencing and authenticating academic credentials, while NERD simultaneously preserves and organises the research and intellectual outputs produced across Nigeria’s education system.
“The milestone also comes as the Tinubu administration seeks to reposition education as an instrument for skills development, innovation and economic growth.”
NERD now provides a measurable digital component to that policy direction: rather than leaving Nigeria’s academic heritage dispersed among hundreds of institutions, the country is gradually assembling a national body of knowledge that can be counted, verified, organised and analysed.(NAN)
Edited by Ismail Abdulaziz