The Federal Government has launched a national digital platform to tackle certificate fraud and strengthen the integrity of academic records across Nigeria’s tertiary education system. The platform, known as the Nigeria Education Repository and Data Bank, is designed to secure, digitise and authenticate academic records from universities, polytechnics, monotechnics and colleges of education.
Minister of Education Maruf Tunji Alausa announced the deployment during a national capacity-building programme for school representatives. He described the system as strategic national infrastructure aimed at protecting the credibility of Nigerian qualifications and improving education data management in the digital era.
According to the minister, the initiative is part of the government’s effort to curb certificate fraud, improve data governance and preserve Nigeria’s academic records in a reliable digital format. He said the repository is intended to keep control of the country’s education data within Nigeria while strengthening public trust in academic credentials.
Alausa said the platform has recorded early progress within four months of enforcement. He said nearly 100,000 digital student submissions had already been preserved, while more than 250 tertiary institutions had been integrated for real-time credential verification. He added that over 133,000 students, more than 6,800 lecturers and over 655 institutional focal officers had been enrolled nationwide.
He also said the initiative had supported the creation of more than 1,000 digital service centres through collaboration with local technology entrepreneurs, generating over 3,000 jobs.
The minister said academic certificates are a national guarantee of quality and due process and must be protected by strong record-keeping systems. He referred to recent investigations into fake foreign certificates from unaccredited institutions, saying affected individuals had been removed from the public service and new safeguards had been introduced to prevent a recurrence.
He further announced the NERD Annual National Laureate Prize and Award Programme to recognise outstanding undergraduate, master’s and doctoral research, with prizes ranging from N5 million to N20 million. The first edition is scheduled for November.
Alausa also disclosed that participation in the NERD system will become a mandatory requirement for participation in, or exemption from, the National Youth Service Corps. He said compliance would be enforced through agencies including the National Universities Commission, the National Board for Technical Education, the National Commission for Colleges of Education, TETFund and the Industrial Training Fund.
Key features of the platform include a National Credential Number, a National Credential Revocation Service, a National Student Clearing House, a federated repository of academic theses and abstracts, and a national academic publication and indexing database.
NERD Chief Executive Officer Tunji Ariyomo said the platform would help preserve academic knowledge and research outputs while improving accountability in academic supervision. He said it would also address copyright and intellectual property concerns affecting students, lecturers and institutions.
