The Minister of Education, Dr Maruf Olatunji Alausa, has unveiled a ₦365 million annual prize fund for outstanding research in Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions, placing commercialisation, innovation and measurable national impact at the centre of the Federal Government’s push to reward academic excellence.
Alausa, who inaugurated the Tertiary Institutions National Laureate Prize Committee in Abuja on Wednesday, said the initiative was designed to change the country’s reward system by giving exceptional research and intellectual achievements the national recognition they deserve.
The minister explained that the programme would reward the best undergraduate dissertation with ₦35 million, the top master’s thesis with ₦50 million, and the best doctoral research with ₦100 million.
Beyond the three major prizes, he added that six National Laureate Excellence Awards, each worth ₦30 million, would be presented in Medicine and Health Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Agriculture, Law, Arts and Social Sciences, and Teaching Innovation, which brings the annual prize pool to approximately ₦365 million.
The minister said the scheme, being implemented by the Nigeria Education Repository and Databank (NERD) in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Education, was a deliberate attempt to move Nigerian education beyond certificate production towards research that creates products, businesses, technologies and solutions.
Alausa said Nigeria could no longer afford to allow potentially transformative research generated in universities and other tertiary institutions to remain confined to academic shelves.
He said the country was already home to young researchers and academics developing ideas capable of tackling major developmental challenges but that many of these achievements had historically received inadequate national visibility and recognition.
According to him, the new prize is therefore intended to send a clear message to students and researchers that “scholarship matters; research matters; innovation matters.”
The minister charged the newly inaugurated committee with establishing the governance and integrity framework needed to ensure that the programme earns the confidence of students, academics and institutions across the country.
Under the current framework, according to the minister, participating universities can nominate up to 18 research works, six undergraduate dissertations, six Master’s theses and six doctoral theses across approved thematic areas, while equivalent arrangements apply to other eligible tertiary institutions.
The programme, he added, is also expected to push research towards commercial and industrial applications, rather than treating academic publication as the final destination.
Alausa said an undergraduate whose research produces a commercially viable innovation should be able to see a future for that idea beyond graduation.
“Similarly, a master’s student working on a solution to a national problem should know that government and industry are interested in the outcome, while doctoral researchers should have a clearer route from laboratory discoveries to industrial application, enterprise creation and national development.”
He argued that Nigeria’s natural resources alone could not guarantee competitiveness if the country failed to build an ecosystem capable of transforming research into innovation and innovation into productive economic activity.
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