- An online warehouse for academic records with integrity
- Email: info@ned.gov.ng |
- +2348033164294
Join Nigeria's premier academic repository and databank to secure your academic records and contribute to national education development.
The Nigeria Education Databank (NED) branded as the National Education Repository and Databank (NERD) is an electronic platform and a one-stop-shop for the national management, administration, and preservation of education data, records, documents and audio-visual assets.
It shall operate as a set of new services to address specific challenges in the education sector.
These include the provision of a central reference point for data consistency covering every aspect of post-secondary education for national planning; perpetual preservation of academic reports and publications; enhancement of the quality of academic reports nationwide through outright elimination of plagiarism and the promotion of attribution; fostering of inter-institution collaboration and positive competition; mitigation of capital flight from previous dependence upon foreign products and services in education data management; the establishment of the Nigerian index of academic publications as a national flagship; a central national repository for equitable access to lecture notes and materials; and, the decisive launch of a systemic quality assurance check nationwide to curtail academic fraud which threatens the integrity of the education sector due to the activities of merchants of fake degrees, 'arrangee' qualifications, phoney certificates, bogus unearned honours from unaccredited institutions and diploma mills.
The Federal Ministry of Education and the National Universities Commission (NUC) with the support of the private sector worked on the idea of a unified National Education Databank for Nigeria for the warehousing of all academic records and publications since 2013. In 2022, the Federal Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy through the Nigeria Data Protection Bureau (now Commission) formally accepted to support the Nigeria Education Repository and Databank programme with data compliance framework. The NUC afterwards formally presented a memorandum dated 11th of May 2023 with Ref. No. NUC/ES/334/VOL.130/420 to the Honourable Minister of Education for the commencement of due process leading for the establishment of NERD and the National Policy for its operation which the latter graciously approved.
On the 21st of November 2023, an expansive stakeholders' meeting was held with all vice chancellors, rectors, provosts and others stakeholders across the nation's education sector. All other education delivery institutions outside the direct supervision of the Federal Ministry of Education such as the Nursing and Midwifery Council, schools and colleges of Agriculture, institutes with the Act of the National Assembly, etc, were also in attendance.
The Federal Executive Council (FEC) on the 23rd of May 2023 formally approved the establishment of the National Education Repository and Databank (NERD) and the National Policy for its implementation and operation. On the 4th of February 2025, the Federal executive Council further approved the appointment of the Concessionaire for the implementation of the project and approved the Declaration of Effectiveness for the NERD.
By virtue of FEC's approval, the NERD Policy applies in equal measures to all education delivery institutions regardless of ownership type (public, private, military or civilian) whether within or outside the direct supervision of the Federal Ministry of Education such as Colleges or Schools of Nursing, Agriculture, specialized research centres and institutes, etc.
All universities, all polytechnics, all monotechnics, all colleges of education, all research centres, all institutes with charters of the National Assembly, etc are affected by NERD.
Similarly, in line with FEC approval in the exercise of Mr. President's power in Council as provided in Sections 2(4)(4) and 16(1)(C) of the NYSC Act, Cap. N84, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004, the National Youth Service Corps shall, following this declaration, mobilize, exempt, or refund only students who have fully complied with the NERD standard as defined in the approved regulations enshrined in the NERD Policy regardless of whether they had their education experience within or outside Nigeria.
Likewise, the Industrial Training Fund (ITF) is obligated to check for compliance with the NERD Policy as a prerequisite for its services.
For two decades, Nigeria relied on foreign services for academic records management, causing national security concerns, erosion of national pride, and capital flight. Also, there is massive problem regarding the inability to safeguard theses which eventually end up in a dump and the research is not properly utilized for national development.
NERD solves this by creating a centralized Nigeria Education databank to preserve Nigeria's academic records and intellectual outputs while ensuring data consistency in education.
As Sub-Saharan Africa's first private-sector-led big data project for education, NERD establishes Nigeria's control over its educational data ecosystem.
"NERD-indexed-journals are now designated by the Federal Government of Nigeria as Special National Indexes of Academic Publications (SNIAP) available to willing Nigerian academics and promoters of institutional journals and shall be acceptable for promotion and research/academic career advancement purposes and peerage privileges presently associated with their foreign equivalents such as SCOPUS, SCImago, etc across all tertiary institutions in Nigeria."
"...the unveiling of the NERD project is a pivotal moment in the history of post-secondary and tertiary education in Nigeria and a ground-breaking initiative of the Federal Government of Nigeria."
"Number one, I hope the NERD project will kickstart immediately. I wish to emphasise the word 'immediately'. This is something we have all been expecting and something that should have happened. It should have happened a long time ago. Now that we are in it, we must guard against further delays."
