Hundreds of graduate research projects across Nigerian universities are rotting away in storerooms and open spaces due to poor preservation and a lack of digitisation.
At Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED), Ijebu Ode, piles of abandoned dissertations were reportedly seen dumped near the Academic Affairs building, with several damaged by rain and termites. University staff attributed the situation to ongoing renovations but were unable to confirm plans for storage or digital archiving.
Similar conditions exist in many public universities, where student projects are discarded shortly after submission. Unlike institutions in countries such as South Africa and Kenya that maintain digital research repositories, most Nigerian universities still rely on physical copies with no backup.
Education experts have described the neglect as a waste of intellectual resources, warning that it undermines innovation and policy development.
They called on the Federal Ministry of Education and the National Universities Commission (NUC) to enforce mandatory research preservation and digitisation policies to safeguard academic work for future use.
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