96% ACE programmes in Nigerian varsities pass NUC accreditation

THE National Universities Commission has disclosed that 79 programmes, representing 96.3 per cent of all the programmes run across the 10 African Centres of Excellence in Nigerian universities, have passed the commission’s accreditation hurdle.

Executive secretary of NUC, Professor Abubakar Rasheed, who doubles as the chairman of the National Project Performance Review Committee (NPPRC), made this known at the Bayero University, Kano, Centre for Dryland Agriculture.

He revealed that the 10 centres presented a total of 82 proposed programmes for accreditation, after sailing through the NUC resource verification process. Only three failed the accreditation exercise.

ACE is a regional project that is aimed at promoting specialisation, research and technology development in the continent. The project was approved in 2013 and is expected to close at the end of 2018, with the World Bank committing about $180 million  to the project.

Professor Rasheed explained that with the attainment of the national accreditation, which was a prerequisite for international accreditation, the ACEs had met a key disbursement linked indicator for the project.

According to the weekly bulletin of the commission, the executive secretary, while commending the ACEs for the achievement, noted that many of the centres had been too ambitious in their programme proposal, and that the three programmes that were declined accreditation were not aimed at punishing any centre.

Rasheed told the ACEs that they were expected to pursue excellence while focusing on few areas, and encouraged them to set limited and attainable targets for themselves.

He advised them that other programmes could be mounted in relevant faculties of the universities, instead of over-burdening the centres with so many programmes.