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 making Nigerian research more accessible, while simultaneously building a national database for the instant validation of academic credentials.
Data from the repository 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 Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, whose administration has increasingly 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, CON, NERD has grown into an increasingly broad national infrastructure connecting institutions, students, academic works, workers, and credentials within a common digital environment.
-629 institutions active on repository-
The scale of institutional participation is equally significant.
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.