NEDI Moves To End Paper-Based School Data Collection By 2027

The Nigerian Education Data Infrastructure (NEDI) is targeting 100 percent coverage of schools data by next year as it moves the country from a manual paper and biro system to a real-time online portal.

The National Coordinator of NEDI, Mr. Abubakar Isah, disclosed this in an exclusive interview in NEWSNGR in Abuja, explaining that the old system made Nigeria always late with education data.

“The state we are used to is paper and biro. And it takes forever for them to be able to transcribe that into sense. And it takes about two years or so, so we are always late, ” he said.

He said the paper-based method took forever to transcribe and left the country about two years behind in reporting.

He added that with the new system, schools are now required to go online to submit their data, a process which also has its own teaching programme to guide users.

Isah noted that the 2024-2025 data, which is already in the public domain, took almost one year to collect because people had not gotten used to the system.

That dataset, he said, achieved 82 percent coverage for public schools, but the figure drops when private schools were added, noting that in terms of number of learners in public schools, coverage is already about 80 percent.

For the 2025-2026 academic year, Isah said collection started in March and has already reached 92.2 percent for public schools, up from 82 percent the previous year.

He said the exercise, which should have closed by the end of September, was extended by one month and will now close by the end of October.

“Collection for the 2026-2027 academic year will commence in November and is projected to end by May, thereby shrinking the collection period to give administrators enough time to analyse the data and plan towards the next year,” he said.

He cited Rivers State as an example of progress, noting that the state which recorded zero participation in 2024-2025 has now achieved 92.9 percent for 2025-2026.

Isah explained that every school in Nigeria now has an identity and can log on to submit its data, with a designated EMIS officer responsible for submission, and that the sites have been whitelisted to be free on Airtel network.

Despite this, he said some states still insist they need money to go to schools to collect data, describing it as a culture that will take a while to break.

On whether sanctions would be applied to non-complying states, Isah said education is on the concurrent list and the Federal Government does not own schools adding that states own, create and licence schools and choose textbooks, so the Federal Government can only advise, appeal and cajole them.

He said the government is using a carrot and stick approach by ensuring that all development partners, including the World Bank and UNICEF, now use the NEDI platform for analysis, such that states that fail to submit data, particularly private schools data, will be disadvantaged.

On data integrity, Isah said NEDI maintains a list of all schools and adds new ones as they are created, while also giving states responsibility to add schools, explaining that NEDI is working with the National Bureau of Statistics to validate data by sampling schools in states and using the level of deviation to determine correctness.

He also disclosed that the ministry is giving every learner an identity that will be tied to a school and tracked even when the learner relocates.

He said from January next year, every school in the country will go online to upload the continuous assessment of every learner on a portal linked to WAEC, with three assessments per year.

He explained that in the next two to three years, learners without continuous assessment records for SS1 and SS2 will not be able to sit for WASSCE, a measure designed to put order in the system and stop candidates from registering examinations in obscure miracle centres.

He added that learners can still relocate in JSS1 to SS2 but must remain in the same school in SS3.

“If you don’t have continuous assessment for SS1, SS2, you won’t have WAEC. We have to begin to put some order into our system,” he said.

Isah said the platform already has close to 4 million learners, with the goal of capturing all learners by the end of the year.

He said the NEDI platform also displays detailed WAEC performance data and transition data, which can be disaggregated by state and zone, showing for instance the number of learners in SS1 compared to those who wrote WASSCE and JAMB.

NEWSNGR’s check on the Digital National Education Management Information System (DNEMIS) dashboard for the 2024/2025 school year showed that 230,844 schools were recorded, with 124,066 schools reporting, representing 53.7 percent, covering 39,825,932 learners, 1,185,610 teachers, 725,778 classrooms and 604,479 toilets.