The Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission (NUC), Professor Julius A Okojie, OON has said that the Nigerian Research and Education Network (NgREN) had the potential to enhance the achievements of the Science and Technology Education, Post-Basic (STEP-B) project by bringing the centers of excellence set up by the intervention together for higher and more efficient collaboration. Professor Okojie disclosed that NgREN would reduce the cost of bandwidth from about $1,260/ mbps/month to about $129/ mbps/month, adding that when the second phase of the REN was completed, the cost would further reduce to about $20/mbps month.

The Executive Secretary, remarked that the NgREN was an initiative of the NUC with the support of the Committee of Vice-chancellors (CVC), the Nigerian University System (NUS) and the Ministry of Communication Technology. He noted that the purpose of NgREN was to provide cheaper bandwidth for member institutions and efficient network infrastructure to the research and education community. The NUC Scribe added that NgREN was to provide network services and applications to promote linkages and collaborations between the research communities and leverage technology to promote new trends and innovative ways of teaching and learning. He identified some of the challenges faced by the REN to include; funding, inadequate technical capacity, poorly-designed networks in universities, inadequate power and poorly-coordinated nature of research activities.

He disclosed that a broad based proposal to address these problems, including the extension of the network to the remaining 102 universities and several polytechnics, colleges of education and research institutes amounting to over 600 Higher Education institutions in Nigeria had been developed. The Executive Secretary, thanked the Federal Government, for its contributions to the actualisation of the project, the Honorable Minister of State for Education and the Honourable Minister of Communication Technology for their tremendous support, the World Bank, through which the Step-B project assisted in providing the funds to enable the initial phase of the project; connecting 27 older Federal Universities to take off.


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