By Felix Khanoba
The President Bola Tinubu-led Federal Government has unveiled plans to strengthen education planning and accountability through a unified national data system aimed at improving learning outcomes across the country.
Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, disclosed this on Thursday in Abuja during the National Stakeholders’ Workshop on the Nigeria Education Data Infrastructure (NEDI).
He expressed concern that despite huge investments by development partners in parts of the country over the last decade, literacy and numeracy levels in the affected regions remained poor.
According to him, available records indicated that nearly 80 per cent of donor funding targeted at education was concentrated in two geopolitical zones without producing the expected improvements.
“As we look at our data, about 80 per cent of development financing investments in the last 10 years went to two geopolitical zones in the country.
“Those two zones still have the lowest literacy and numeracy rates in the country. So, it is like wasted investment,” he said.
Alausa said the introduction of the NEDI platform would help government and stakeholders make informed decisions based on credible and harmonised data.
He noted that the absence of a centralised education database in the past had resulted in fragmented planning and made it difficult to determine whether interventions were yielding measurable impact.
The minister explained that the new system would provide real-time information on school infrastructure, teacher qualifications, learner performance and the effectiveness of investments nationwide.
He described the platform as Nigeria’s “single source of truth” for education statistics, adding that it would improve budget planning and ensure resources were channelled to areas with the greatest needs.
Alausa further stated that the Federal Government was adopting an outcome-based funding model backed by technology and data analytics to enhance transparency and accountability in the education sector.
“We know where investments need to go, but as we invest, are we getting the outcomes we need?
“And if we are not getting those outcomes, what do we need to do? How do we return to the drawing board?
“Today, we are doing things based on data,” he said.
The minister also said the government intended to maximise the country’s youthful population through improved education quality and better alignment between training programmes and labour market demands.
He revealed that the Nationwide Learner Identification Number (NLIN), linked to the National Identification Number (NIN), would help track students throughout their academic journey and strengthen planning across the sector.
According to him, the initiative already enables authorities to monitor enrolment figures, infrastructure, teacher availability and learning outcomes in over 240,000 schools nationwide.
Alausa clarified that the learner identification programme was not a separate identity scheme but an integration with the existing NIN system to create permanent learner records from basic to tertiary education.
“With this platform, we can know the number of students, teachers’ qualifications, available classrooms, computers and even water facilities in any school from one dashboard,” he said.
He added that labour market data would eventually be integrated into the platform to guide students toward courses relevant to national workforce needs, while entrepreneurship training would be strengthened in tertiary institutions to encourage self-reliance.
Earlier, NEDI Coordinator, Dr Abubakar Isah, said the platform was created to improve educational outcomes, strengthen accountability and ensure efficient allocation of resources across the country.
Isah explained that before the initiative, education data in Nigeria existed in disconnected systems with weak coordination and inconsistent reporting structures, limiting effective policy implementation.
Also speaking, Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Hajiya Imaan Suleiman-Ibrahim, described the initiative as an important tool for promoting child protection, girls’ education and social inclusion.
She said reliable education data would help government institutions identify gaps and deploy interventions more effectively.
In his remarks, Enugu State Deputy Governor, Mr Ifeanyi Ossai, said the initiative represented critical national infrastructure capable of driving evidence-based planning and national development.
He recalled that an audit conducted by the state government after assuming office revealed that many public schools were in poor condition, prompting the construction of 267 smart green schools across the state’s 260 wards.
