Transcript Slide 1

NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES ICT
SOLUTION PROJECT
By
STEP-B PROJECT TEAM
National Universities Commission, Abuja.
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PREAMBLE
• Nigeria is acknowledged to have capacity
for innovation (ranked 47th out of 133) and
a good level of company spending on R &
D (ranked 40th) – thanks to Mobile
telecommunications companies – World
Economic Forum report, 2009.
• Unfortunately, in Public expenditure on
education as a % of GNI, Nigeria is
placed128th (WDI – 2009)
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PREAMBLE
• Consequently, Nigeria is 91st in Internet
Access in Schools, 97th in Quality of Maths
and Science Education and 115th in overall
Quality of Scientific research institutions.
• For this to change, Nigeria has to invest in IT
infrastructure, Access, Usage and efficiency.
• Currently, 90th in Networked Readiness
Index, 102nd in % of Internet users, 114th in
% of PC owners and 117th in Broadband
internet subscribers (ITU – WTI, 2008 -2009)3
PREAMBLE
• END RESULT OF THESE
– In the 2010 Webometrics ranking of top 8,000
Universities in the World, the first 100 in Africa has
only 5 Nigerian Universities listed.
– Tops in the country is the University of Ilorin that
came in 55th in Africa and 5,846th in the World. The
other four that made the list are; OAU (61st – Africa,
6,265th – World), UI (63rd – Africa, 6,396th – World),
UJ (74th – Africa, 7,000th, World) & UniLag (79th –
Africa, 7,246th – World)
• WE ARE NOT DELIVERING AND
THINGS MUST CHANGE
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PREAMBLE
• It is to be noted that many African countries
are ranked ahead of Nigeria in all of these
areas.
• Without basic research infrastructure, the
evolution of a knowledge economy
necessary for sustained development will be
impossible.
• Higher Education institutions and research
agencies should drive this process of
generating knowledge for national
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development.
PREAMBLE
• High capacity networks provide the information highway
upon which knowledge travels
• Countries as diverse as the USA, South Africa, Australia,
Belgium, The UK, Ghana and Kenya have realized this
and are investing heavily in infrastructure, content and
capacity building. Supra-national networks also already
exist in Latin America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific
region.
• SANReN was launched in December 2009
• Implementing a high capacity OFC-BASED
network must now be a foundational priority for
teaching and research.
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THE NREN INITIATIVE
• At a Workshop on Strategies for ICT Development and
Access to More Affordable Bandwidth for Universities,
Research and Higher Educational Institutions in Nigeria
organized by the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian
Universities (AVCNU) on 26th February, 2008, it was agreed
that ICT is essential for
 Supporting the development and sharing of online
information and e-resources
 Supporting collaborative research among Nigerian
Universities, Research and Higher Educational Institutions
(in addition to collaborative research with others)
 Running joint online courses and sharing expertise
 Sharing of experiences and best practices
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 Providing opportunities for Student and Staff exchange
THE NREN INITIATIVE
The Workshop therefore resolved to establish a
National Research and Education Network
(NREN) while noting that the required
networking and access to online resources is
impeded by:
 High Cost of Bandwidth
 Absence of interconnectivity between the universities
leading HEIs to act individually and thus unable to
benefit from the economy of scale
 Inadequate Technical Capacity
 Unstable power supply
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THE NREN INITIATIVE
• The ICT Forum was mandated to take
leadership to actualise the dream BUT no
funding arrangements were made.
• This proposal presents the opportunity to,
for the first time, establish the foundation
for the realisation of the NREN dream and
its attendant benefits.
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FG INITIATIVES
• In mid-2007, the FEC approved a number of ICT
initiatives;
– Development of Student ICT Resource Centres in
the Universities
– Computer Acquisition Scheme for Lecturers
– Video-Driven Lectures
– Upgrade of websites leveraging the content
server of the Federal Ministry of Education
– Pooling of bandwidth requirements to achieve
economies of scale in procurement
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FG INITIATIVES
VIDEO-DRIVEN LECTURES
• Fully interactive audio-visual broadcast
• Lectures projected using a standard DLP
projector and audio components
• Institutions can participate by simply
logging on to the video bridge at time of
lecture.
• The cost implications: Central hub for delivery broadcast and
management - N52 million; cost per institution – N10.3 million.
Total cost implication by Galaxy Backbone – N301 million.
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FG INITIATIVES
POOLED BANDWIDTH INITIATIVE
• Galaxy Backbone shall deliver:
• a fully managed service with utilization reports
• a 100 magebit per second bandwidth pool for ondemand utilization across 24 universities
• CPE equipment for C-band support at all locations; and
• Real Time Video learning collaboration across 24
institutions.
• The cost implication of the 100 Megabit pooled
bandwidth shall be N623 million.
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SUMMARY OF ISSUES
 Lack of adequate interconnectivity
between universities which prevents
communication and resource-sharing.
effective
 Lack of adequate internet bandwidth leading to
poor access to internet-based learning resources.
 Human
capacity constraints leading to service
delivery problems.
 Dearth of modern learning &
collaboration content and tools leading to lowquality teaching and research.
 Unstable
power
network downtimes.
supply leading to increased
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THE ENABLERS
• Presence of nationwide OFC backbone. Fibre represents a better
commercial proposition when compared with satellite based systems
which are expensive, susceptible to weather interference and have
limitations in capacity.
– More than 10,000km of OFC across the country (within reach of all
University campuses)
• Arrival of marine cables
– Sat-3 (NITEL- owned)
– Glo-1 (640Gb/s lit November 2009)
– MainOne (1.92Tb/s to be lit June 2010)
– WACS (3.84Tb/s to be lit Q2, 2011)
• Availability of quality capacity development opportunities within and
outside Nigeria
• Increasing capacity and affordability of Inverter Technology
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ADDRESSING THESE PROBLEMS
 The proposal intends to create a broadband network by
leasing capacity from existing backbone infrastructure
owners and organizing the leased capacity to form a
virtual private network, connecting all institutions
together and supporting the deployment of teaching,
learning and management tools and applications.
 The increasing capacity availability on the fibre optic
networks - which support the transfer of high volumes
of data will be leveraged to create a NUBNet
(Nigerian Universities Broadband Network) connection
hubbed at the National Universities Commission for
effective management and centralized support.
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THE THREE SOLUTION PILLARS
 Provision of Broadband Connectivity
A high-speed mesh network for Universities
A high-speed internet access via marine cable
 Capacity building
Operators’ workshop
End-user buy-in
Regulators workshops
Government stakeholders’ workshops
User community training for staff and
sensitization for students
 Power inverters
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PROPOSED ACTIVITIES
 Appointment of Consultants
 Establishment of a Network Management
Centre at the NUC
 Inter Connection of all Federal Universities and
NUC by fibre
 Internet connectivity via marine cable
 Capacity development programme
 Content development and platforms
 Acquisition and installation of equipment for
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alternative source of energy
PROJECT BENEFITS
 Economies of scale as pooled resources work out
cheaper when costs are factored on a per institution
bases; for example, Current average cost of internet
bandwidth per University is $4.25/kbps/month via
weather and electromagnetic energy-impacted
VSAT. Envisaged cost in this project is
$1.50/kbps/month via faster and more reliable
marine cable. This translates to about N315m per
annum as against N623m for a weaker solution
 Capacity building for various stakeholders;
 Uninterrupted power for vital network equipment.
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PROJECT BENEFITS
 A high capacity connectivity that allows the
institutions to communicate and collaborate
effectively with each other (VoIP, Video
Conferencing, remote experimentation etc) and with
NUC hosted central resources, without incurring any
additional network costs;
 Adequate Internet bandwidth to access internet
based resources for research and learning;
 Centralization of applications and resources (ebooks, e-journals, open courseware etc) that are
best hosted at a ‘hub’ location, in this case the NUC;
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 Consolidated co-management of network;
PROJECT COST
The project is structured to deliver tools and
services to drive STI in the Nigerian
education system with a total sum of
55,613,175.70 Million US Dollars
It is noteworthy that the cost of connecting
additional institutions to the network will be
limited to their last-mile connectivity needs
only
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SUSTAINABILITY PLAN
The budget is for an initial period of 3 years for key project
components. Within this 3-year period, it is envisaged that a
sustainability scheme will be triggered from the first year with the
following elements;
 The Federal Government of Nigeria through the Education Trust
Fund and the Petroleum Technology Development Fund will be
requested to make available an annual grant to service the project.
 The Federal Ministry of Education will propose an annual
appropriation vote head to the Federal Government as part of its
annual budget.
 Contributions from benefiting institutions from ICT fees charged
along with School Fees or other forms of Internally Generated
Revenue (IGR).
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THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
1. Continued innovation
2. Demonstration of value
3. Funding
4. Coordination
5. Technical integrity
6. Senior level championing
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THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
1. Continued innovation
• The proposed high capacity network must benefit from innovation on
an ongoing basis. Whilst the intention is to commence with the
sharing of content, tools and resources, the infrastructure can easily
be expanded to support IP telephony across all campuses ensuring
cost free calls within and between institutions in addition to a host of
other services that will naturally be triggered by the network e.g.
telemedicine, tele-presence etc
• To guarantee this, the project concept recognizes the role of a
consultant who will provide quarterly reports on the utilization of the
network and the potential for additional tools based on global trends.
This will guarantee a proactive rather than reactive response to
advances in broadband-supported education and research delivery.23
THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
2. Demonstration of value
• Whilst it is important to deemphasize cost where education
delivery is concerned, a key pillar of the initiative will be
continued demonstration of value in terms of what the
infrastructure and resources are contributing to the advancement
of science and technology education in Nigeria.
• Accordingly, part of the project design is to deliver a
benchmarking template that provides empirical proof of value in
the following areas:
– Cost efficiency
– Educational advancement
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THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
3. Funding
• The World Bank intervention is structured only to
catalyze the project. It is expected that from year four
onwards the project will be fully funded directly from
headline
budgetary
appropriations
and
from
counterpart contributions.
• To achieve this it is intended to push for categorization
of the infrastructure as critical education support
system backed by legislative enactment to provide
funding from the national funding pool.
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THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
4. Coordination
• For continued operational success, expansion and
development, the project must benefit from proper
coordination. The Initiative will initially domicile this with
a special purpose vehicle comprising of the NUC and
University representatives to ensure that the network
exclusively serves educational interests within the
university sector.
• If the network is expanded to include other tertiary
institutions, a joint board with representation from the
other tertiary regulators and institutions will coordinate
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the affairs of the project.
THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
5. Technical integrity
• To guarantee technical integrity it is intended to
subject the project to independent half yearly
reviews which will focus on:
- Service level adherence
- Bandwidth verification
- Application and resource availability analysis
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THE SUSTAINABILITY
PILLARS
6. Senior level championing
• We believe senior level championing is a key
driver to sustainability. The project design involves
a capacity component for this element and we
propose its inclusion on an ongoing basis.
• This will always focus the leadership on the
ongoing potentials offered by ICT in the delivery
of their mandate and provide continued
accumulation of knowledge as it develops on a
global basis.
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Thank you and God Bless
http://www.nuc.edu.ng
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