Units:

1. Project Management
2. Project Account/Finance
3. Project Support

The Second Africa Higher Education Centres of Excellence for Development Impact (ACE Impact) Project is a World Bank-supported initiative designed to improve the quality, quantity, and development impact of postgraduate education in participating universities across West and Central Africa. Nigeria is host to the largest number of Centres of Excellence under the ACE Impact Project, with 17 Centres domiciled in 14 universities across the three levels of university proprietorship in Nigeria.

The primary objectives of the ACE Impact Project include:

• Improving the quality, quantity and development impact of postgraduate education in selected universities through regional specialisation and collaboration.

• Enhancing regional specialisation and collaboration among participating institutions.
• Supporting institutional governance and financial management systems.
• Promoting demand-driven innovation and engagement with the private sector and government entities.

The Directorate of Special Projects is responsible for coordinating Nigeria’s participation in the ACE Impact initiative, ensuring alignment with national development priorities, and facilitating interactions between the Centres and key stakeholders.

The following are the centres under the ACE Impact Project:

The Division is headed by Mr. Peter Tobrise (Deputy Director)

Units:

1. Project Management
2. Project Account/Finance
3. Project Support

The Sustainable Procurement, Environmental, and Social Standards Enhancement (SPESSE) Project was launched in 2021 by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) with assistance from the World Bank. The project’s objective is to develop sustainable capacity in managing procurement, environmental, and social standards in the public and private sectors. The cornerstone of SPESSE implementation is the creation of six Centres of Excellence (CEs) in Nigerian universities to deliver a series of capacity-building tracks sustainably. The National Universities Commission’s Directorate of Special Projects in the Independent Facilitation Unit (INFU) the Project. At the same time, the Bureau of Public Procurement, Federal Ministry of Environment, and Federal Ministry of Women Affairs are the Implementing Agencies (IAs).

One federal university was selected from each of the country’s six geo-political zones to host the SPESSE Centres of Excellence. They are:

The Division is overseen by Mr. Chinedu Otuya (Ag)

Units:

1. Network Operations & Services
2. Network Administrative Services

 The Nigerian Research and Education Network (NgREN) was established by the NUC in 2012, in collaboration with the Committee of Vice-Chancellors (CVC) and Nigerian universities, with support from the World Bank. The aim of NgREN was to create an elaborate infrastructure backbone that links all research and educational institutions in Nigeria to bridge the educational divide, enhance research and academic capabilities, and foster collaboration and academic excellence through robust infrastructure and collaborative initiatives for knowledge exchange. 

An initial grant of ten million USD (USD $10,000,000.00) from the World Bank was used to provide backbone infrastructure and last-mile connectivity to 27 federal universities, the NUC, and the Secretariat of the CVC. Subsequently, other interventions such as the FGN/World Bank/AFD-sponsored Africa Centres of Excellence for Development Impact and SPESSE Projects enabled the NgREN to sustain its existing members and expand its reach across the Nigerian university system.

The network currently connects more than 30 universities in Nigeria with approximately 40 points of presence (PoP).

NgREN has empowered researchers, educators, and students through services such as: 

1. Access to high-speed internet service.
2. Access to advanced research tools, computing resources, data storage and enabling cutting-edge research and innovation. 
3. Access to flexible e-learning platforms like Moodle.
4. Access to global educational resources such as subscription to ProQuest, Ebscohost, ScienceDirect, and MatLab etc. 

In 2018, the National Universities Commission (NUC) developed a blueprint for the rapid revitalisation of university education in Nigeria. The Blueprint Strategy identified challenges facing the university system across federal, state, and private universities. In addition to the diagnosis, the Strategy outlines 15 policy goals focused on the quality and relevance of university education programmes, governance of the university system, efficiency and employability, long-term financing, human resource allocation, and professional qualifications.

The Federal Government of Nigeria requested the French Development Agency (AFD) support the implementation of the Blueprint Strategy. Following a series of meetings, AFD’s Board approved an initial credit of forty million US dollars ($40,000,000.00) to kickstart the implementation of the Blueprint Project.

Given that the grant is insufficient to cover the entire scope of the Blueprint Project, the AFD and NUC agreed that the Blueprint’s ICT-specific component, “Towards ICT-driven Universities,” will be prioritised in the first phase as the main channel to support the implementation of the Blueprint through a competitive fund project and a call for project proposals (component 1). The vision for the Blueprint’s ICT-specific axis of development is “to instigate the deployment of harmonised and properly coordinated technology platforms for collaborative teaching, learning and research under the following broad expenditure categories:

• Provision of high capacity inter and intra-institutional network and collaboration/communication network resources as well as other ICT infrastructure.
• Deployment and management of state-of-the-art ICT services relevant to the transformation of the Nigerian higher education system.
• Integration of ICT into the day-to-day activities of the higher education institutions (HEIs) for learning, administration, research, and other related services; and
• Technical and managerial human capacity development to ensure that all solutions/services/infrastructure deployed meet international standards as well as providing institutional managers with the requisite knowledge on the nature and type of services/solutions to be deployed.

More specifically, the strategic objective of the project is to enhance ICT infrastructure, governance and use in teaching and learning in selected universities under NUC’s coordination.

The proposed project on the ICT component of the Blueprint to be funded by AFD is to be known as ICT Development in the Nigerian University System (ICT-Dev) or Grant for the Development of Information and Communication Technology in the Nigerian University System.