Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria has almost doubled the population of Egypt and Ethiopia. Nigeria has 63 percent of young population below the age of 24 and the relative annual growth rate of the country is 3.24 percent.
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The incredibly high young population means that government is at present hard pressed to meet. The number of students has increased from below 15, 000 in 1970 to about 1.2 million in 2013, at the tertiary level alone. It is because of this huge growth in demand, a large number of tertiary students annually misses out because there are not enough seats in the educational institutions to meet the demands. (Source:bit.ly/1cU9unJ )
The delivery of quality education in Nigeria is sole responsibility of federal government. Earlier, the state of education sector in Nigeria was very poor, mainly due to the lack of funds. Undoubtedly, federal government is accountable to provide quality education, curriculum design, recommend national education philosophy and direction to the education policy of the country.
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However, the time has changed and Nigerian universities have started getting local and international accolades for the transformation under the recent administration. Slowly and gradually, Nigerian universities have started to compete with the best on the continent as well as global platform.
The improvement marked by Nigerian universities is barely brought to the notice because most NGOs and media organisations are not keen on assessing and inspecting the academic and infrastructural plans being implemented by the current Jonathan government. On the other hand, the World Bank thinks otherwise, as it has selected 10 public and private universities from Nigeria as Centres of Excellence for the exceptional research programmes in societal development.
The World Bank would grant each of these selected African Centres of Excellence, ACE, a sum of $8million USD, N12.8 billion to work on approved research projects. The funds given to the selected ACE is for the duration between 2014 and 2017. Most importantly, out of 18 African Centres of Excellence chosen by World Bank, 10 are from Nigeria.
There are seven federal, one state-owned and two private universities in the list of universities to benefit from World Bank policy. The massive investments from the Jonathan administration made the African Centres of Excellence possible. It will strengthen the ability of the National Universities Commission to observe the activities of universities in Nigeria.
The wise investment by the federal government of Nigeria and efficient observation by the NUC are the real factors behind the accomplishment by Nigerian universities. Since Jonathan got elected to lead the federal government in country, the face of university education has changed for good. Such is the progress made by education sector in Nigeria that the team leader at World Bank, Mr. Andres Bloom, expressed keen interest to partner with the Nigerian government. The level of commitment shown by the project officials was also satisfactory in his eye.
Nigeria will continue to receive the gratitude for expansion of university education. Apart from World Bank, there are plenty of other international agencies keen to collaborate with federal government of Nigeria to further intensify the benefits attained in previous three years.
The Nigerian universities have come a long way and started to taste the fruit of success after the initial days of hard work. Let’s hope that higher education sector in country will continue to rise and yield positive results.
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