By Isa AbdulMumin
When Dr. Maruf Tunji Alausa stood before vice-chancellors and directors of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) in Abuja last month, his message was blunt: “Nigeria can no longer afford to fund research that ends on library shelves.”
“Nigerian university researchers are to get stronger access to investors, industries and commercial opportunities as the Federal Government seeks to turn academic inventions into marketable products, businesses and jobs,” the Minister of Education declared. He then called on NASENI to build stronger ties with universities surrounding its development hubs.
It sounds like policy-speak. But beneath it lies a question Nigeria has wrestled with for decades: why do we produce so many brilliant papers and prototypes, yet import almost everything we use?
A cruel paradox
Nigeria’s universities are not empty of ideas. In the last five years, researchers at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, built a solar-powered tricycle. Scientists at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, developed cassava-based bread flour. Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, holds patents on water purification devices, while teams at the University of Lagos are working on artificial intelligence for fraud detection in banks.
Yet an estimated 90 percent of these innovations never leave the campus. Nigeria spends billions of naira on research grants each year, only to turn around and spend roughly $20 billion annually importing machinery, chemicals, software and even food products that Nigerian researchers could have helped produce locally.
Dr. Alausa frames it as a human capital problem. Under the Nigeria Education Sector Renewal Initiative (NESRI), the government is pushing science, technology, engineering, medicine and mathematics (STEMM), technical and vocational education and training (TVET), and data-driven education to make graduates employable. But degrees without commercialization create unemployed graduates, not industries.
“We are training people to invent, but not training the system to buy those inventions,” says Prof. Olu Aderounmu, a materials scientist at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. “So the brightest minds either leave or become lecturers who write papers for promotion.”
A pipeline clogged by structural failures
To understand why the laboratory-to-market pipeline is clogged, one has to look at some structural failures.
Research funding in Nigeria is almost entirely academic, and at best stops at the prototype stage. Almost none of it is earmarked for scaling, testing or taking a product to market. A lecturer who receives ₦5 million to build a prototype gets zero naira for NAFDAC registration, packaging or factory trials. Investors won’t touch it because the risk is too high, and so the invention dies quietly.
There is also a weak link between universities and industry — unlike what obtains in advanced economies. In the United States, MIT and Stanford sit next to Silicon Valley. In Germany, Fraunhofer Institutes are co-funded by industry. In Nigeria, however, NASENI’s development hubs are located in Idu, Okene and Enugu, yet most surrounding universities have no memorandum of understanding with them. Companies complain that university research is too theoretical, while universities suspect that companies simply want cheap solutions without paying for research and development.
NASENI was created in 1992 precisely to bridge this gap, but until now its hubs have operated largely as isolated workshops. Dr. Alausa’s directive to “build stronger ties” is meant to serve as a wake-up call.
Weak intellectual property and commercialization laws compound the problem. Who owns an invention funded by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), the researcher, the university, or TETFund itself? Even legal experts remain unsure. Without clear ownership, investment in research becomes unattractive, since no investor will fund a scale-up whose proprietary rights are ambiguous. Without a technology transfer framework that properly handles licensing, patents can sit dormant for a decade or more. By last count, Nigeria has fewer than 200 active university patents, compared with South Africa’s more than 2,000.
There is also the question of relevance. A significant portion of academic research is geared toward meeting promotion or graduation requirements rather than solving pressing national problems. There are more than 50 published papers on cassava, yet bakeries still import wheat because no one has scaled cassava flour to industrial grade.
The NESRI framework seeks to correct this by prioritizing TVET, STEMM and out-of-school solutions. The challenge, however, is that universities still reward publication counts over patents and products.
Finally, brain drain and poor infrastructure compound every other setback. World-class research is difficult to conduct amid incessant power outages, and it is hard to retain talented academics at home when a similar job abroad pays several times the salary, with far better-equipped laboratories.
The minister himself has noted that the true test of performance “would not be the number of programmes launched but the tangible improvements Nigerians experience.” For researchers, that means reliable electricity, internet access, facilities and equipment.
NASENI’s new mandate
This is where NASENI comes in. The agency operates ten development institutes and six zonal offices. Under the new initiative, each hub is to “adopt” three to five universities within a 100-kilometre radius.
In practice, this means co-location and shared laboratories: instead of every university buying the same piece of equipment worth hundreds of millions of naira that it seldom uses, NASENI hubs can serve as shared fabrication centres where students and lecturers can produce, test and iterate on prototypes.
NASENI, working with the Bank of Industry and private investors, is also set to create a “Research to Market Fund.” University teams will pitch their innovations, and if selected, receive between ₦20 million and ₦100 million to take a prototype through to pilot stage.
Further to that, NASENI plans to host quarterly “problem sprints” with companies such as Dangote, Innoson, Flour Mills and Flutterwave. Companies bring real-world problems, and university teams compete to solve them within 90 days — with winners receiving contracts.
On intellectual property, NASENI will collaborate with universities to set up Technology Transfer Offices, with a standard revenue-sharing formula of 40 percent to the researcher, 30 percent to the university and 30 percent to the investor — a structure designed to make research commercialization clearer, faster and more bankable.
As the Minister reiterated, “this is not about celebrating achievements but how we can finish what we have started.”
What success could look like
If the NASENI-university link works, the wins could be fast and visible — jobs, not just papers. Commercializing 100 university innovations over two years could create an estimated 25,000 direct and indirect jobs. A cassava-to-ethanol pilot at the University of Ilorin, scaled with NASENI’s support, could alone employ 500 people in Kwara State.
The long-dormant import substitution strategy could also be revived. Nigeria currently spends about ₦1.2 trillion yearly importing pharmaceuticals, packaging materials and auto parts many of which already have working prototypes in Nigerian laboratories. Scaling just 10 percent of them could save the country roughly ₦120 billion in foreign exchange.
Student entrepreneurship stands to gain as well. With access to NASENI hubs, final-year engineering students won’t just graduate — they’ll graduate with a product. The TVET push under NESRI means students can be trained to operate the machines, not just design them.
There is precedent for urgency paying off. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Nigerian universities built ventilators in three weeks, demonstrating a capacity for fast response to national emergencies — though the ventilators ultimately failed to secure certification. Going forward, with NASENI serving as a bridge to NAFDAC, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and industry, the next health or flood crisis could be met with local solutions in weeks rather than years.
The long-term payoff
The real transformation lies in the long-term payoff. Countries such as South Korea, Malaysia and China moved from poverty to prosperity in part by turning research into companies. Samsung began as a university spin-off. Israel has the highest number of startups per capita in the world, owing largely to its tight-knit links between the army, universities and industry.
If Nigeria commercializes research at scale, the country could, within a decade, produce its own “Dangote of Biotech” or “Innoson of MedTech,” built from a university laboratory.
Successful research commercialization could also ease the brain drain problem to some extent. Researchers do not leave because they hate Nigeria; they leave because there is no path to impact. The minister’s stated goal is that “every Nigerian child has access to quality education that provides… the opportunities needed to succeed.” That principle applies to lecturers too.
NASENI’s hubs are located outside Lagos and Abuja, so linking them to nearby universities could turn Kano, Enugu and Akure into genuine innovation clusters. Not everything has to happen in Yaba. This would spread wealth more evenly and reduce pressure on Nigeria’s biggest cities.
NESRI’s stated goal is “global competitiveness and inclusive growth.” But a country cannot compete globally by selling raw cocoa — it competes by selling chocolate made through research on local cocoa processing. The same logic applies to lithium, sesame and software.
What must happen next
For this initiative not to become another white paper, pragmatic steps must be taken in the coming months.
Every NASENI hub must sign binding agreements with its partner universities, embedded with clear key performance indicators and adequate budgetary provision. The National Assembly should pass a “University Innovation Act” that clearly assigns intellectual property rights and offers tax breaks to companies that license university technology. And success must be measured by outcomes, not activities: as the Minister put it, success is not meetings held, but products launched, jobs created and foreign exchange saved.
As Dr. Alausa put it, “education remains the highest-return investment” but that return only materializes when education leaves the classroom. Researchers across Nigeria’s laboratories are ready and waiting for buyers and factories. Let NASENI open the door. If that door opens, Nigeria won’t just consume innovations, it will start exporting them.