Favour Ishember, Abuja
The Minister of Education, Dr. Maruf Tunji Alausa, has called on Nigerian universities and the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure, NASENI, to bridge the divide between scholarship and the market by transforming campus inventions into enterprises, employment and real-world solutions that can power Nigeria’s economic renewal.
Dr. Alausa made the appeal during a briefing for Vice-Chancellors, Directors of Academic Affairs, Directors of Postgraduate Studies and officials of the Federal Ministry of Education’s Directorate of University Education. The meeting focused on a proposed partnership model through the NASENI Campus. He said the model is designed to link researchers with state-of-the-art laboratories, prototyping hubs, industry players and funding sources, creating a clear route for ideas to travel from the lab bench to commercial use.
According to the Minister, Nigeria must intentionally shift from pure research to commercial rollout if it wants to get full value from its people. He warned that research should not stop at journal articles or demonstration models. Citing the innovation cluster around Cambridge, Massachusetts as a reference, Dr. Alausa said Nigerian academics should be able to secure patents for their work, scale those inventions into sellable goods, and team up with investors to launch sustainable firms. That, he noted, is how intellectual capacity becomes tangible national progress.
To deliver this, he urged NASENI to deepen ties with universities located near its development centres. Universities, he said, hold a large reservoir of researchers, lecturers and students whose skills can strengthen the agency’s mandate. NASENI, he added, can fill the critical gap between academic work and business success by assisting with patent applications, linking innovators to venture capital, and helping to set up spin-off companies. He also tasked the agency to look into lithium refining and battery production as Nigeria ramps up renewable energy and industrial growth.
Reiterating government backing, Dr. Alausa said the Ministry will keep working with NASENI, universities and other partners to build a working pipeline from research and innovation through to investment, manufacturing and job creation.
Under President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, he stressed, the goal is not just to generate more research papers, but to ensure Nigeria’s knowledge, skills and inventions become products, companies, jobs and lasting prosperity for citizens.
Earlier, the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive of NASENI, Mr. Khalil Suleiman Halilu, outlined the agency’s push to close the gap between research and manufacturing, in line with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s directive to go beyond prototypes and reach full production. He said the planned NASENI Campus will sit inside a 100-hectare free trade zone and function as a fully integrated ecosystem where scholars, professors, prototyping units, industries and commercial pathways operate side by side. Several factories and industrial plants are already set up within the zone.
Giving a practical example, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Abuja, Professor Hakeem Babatunde Fawehinmi, said the school’s current collaboration with NASENI shows what the model can achieve. The partnership has delivered an integrated agricultural incubation centre, greenhouse units, automated poultry systems and tissue culture laboratories that serve both undergraduate and postgraduate research. He added that the university is prepared to expand the work into dairy science and renewable energy.
Also highlighting market-ready research, the Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, Professor Haruna Musa, said BUK is pursuing wider cooperation with NASENI in nanotechnology, vaccinology, toxinology and mathematical modelling. He revealed that two BUK projects have reached the final phase of NASENI’s research commercialisation grant scheme. The projects are a reusable sanitary pad and the industrial production of starch derivatives from sweet potatoes.
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