Hope Rises for Universities as NgREN Infrastructure Breathes

Nigerian Research and Educational Network (NgREN) has been reactivated, after lying idle for more than one year.

The reactivation of the bandwidth infrastructure for universities and research centres was made possible by National Universities Commission (NUC), the owners of the infrastructure securing funds from the federal government to sustain the operation of the infrastructure.

The infrastructure was launched over two years ago to provide some 27 universities connected to the facility with bandwidth.

NgREN is collaboration between the Federal Ministry of Education, The World Bank and the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that the infrastructure was hit by lack of funding after the initial take-off grant was exhausted and there were no plans to sustain it leaving universities to pay for the service which they could not thereby allowing the infrastructure to gone idle.

The NUC had initially applied to access Tertiary Educational Trust Fund (TETF) for the payment of bandwidth from NgREN. The failure of this initiative, lead to the infrastructure going idle.

On the importance of the infrastructure, Dewole Ajao, operations manager, Bandwidth Consortium, said that beyond just downloading from the Internet, students and researchers in connected universities should be empowered to further their research and education using NgREN. A basic example is access to meteorological data for research into suitability of different areas for crop production. The applications are limitless; the key is to open up the networks and content to students and researchers for innovation. The NgREN should also be used to encourage collaboration and reduce duplication of efforts.

“Very importantly, it would be good to see all the various research institutes we have across Nigeria plugged into the REN so we can harness their output. After all, what is the usefulness of research that ends up in a remote silo that cannot be accessed by those that could benefit from it?