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GIS Higher Education Development in Nigeria: The Example of The GIS Programme, The University Of Ibadan, Nigeria.
Rasheed Yusuf
GIS UNIT,Department of Geography,
Faculty of The Social Sciences
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.
Phone/Fax: 234-2-810-2900
caponerkyusuf@hotmail.com
caponerkyusuf@hotmail.com
ABSTRACT
GIS higher education in Nigeria started in 1996 with the pioneering efforts at the Department of Geography, University of Ibadan. With a pioneering students’ enrolment of thirty graduate students, the programme has grown in leaps and bounds in tune with current trends and demands for GIS education in Nigeria. The programme now boasts of students’ enrolment of about of seventy participants per stream. As with most areas of modern technology, Nigeria is still lagging behind in the development and utilisation of information technology. Poor infrastructural facilities coupled with a poor maintenance culture and low level funding have greatly contributed to this. Poor funding is reflected in the levels of hardware and software available for training purposes.
This paper traces the antecedents of the programme from The Iowa/Nigeria University Development Linkages Project (UDLP) to the present levels of equipments, curriculum development, and students’ enrolment. The present state of funding of the programme is also examined. The goal of the paper is to offer suggestions on the way forward in the areas of curriculum development, funding, skills development and acquisition by lecturers, as well as equipments’ upgrades.
Areas of possible linkages with governmental, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the organized private sector are examined. Also, the role of GIS education in Nigeria’s information technology infrastructure development is suggested.
1 INTRODUCTION
The University of Ibadan in 1996 was the forerunner in pioneering of GIS education in Nigeria by the establishment of the first GIS Laboratory and the introduction of a graduate programme at the Professional Master’s level in the country. The antecedents are traceable to the University Development Linkages Programme (UDLP), a programme embarked upon by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1992.
A programme by which universities in the United States can develop and implement a variety of long term sustainable relationships with institutions in developing countries. The purpose of the UDLP according to USAID is to promote and support the collaboration of US colleges and universities with developing country institutions of higher learning to (1) further the internationalization objectives of US universities, and (2) strengthen developing country institutions to more effectively meet the development needs of their societies. The USAID made fifteen UDLP awards in 1992 one of which was the Iowa/Nigeria five-year university development linkages project which links four institutions in Iowa State, USA with four institutions in Western Nigeria.
The consortium of Iowa institutions of higher learning consists of The University of Iowa, at Iowa City, Iowa State University at Ames, The University of Northern Iowa at Cedar Falls, and the Des Moines Area Community College at Ankeny and Des Moines. These institutions were meant to use the UDLP to build upon and extend linkages with four Nigerian institutions, The University of Ibadan at Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University at Ile-Ife, The Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) at Ibadan, and The Polytechnic at Ibadan. The Iowa/Nigeria UDLP developed a sustainable programme of faculty, staff and student exchange which complemented a number of activities including collaborative research and academic programmes.
The purpose of the Iowa/Nigeria UDLP was to strengthen institutional capacities for research and training in several key areas of development planning, management and analysis. The goals of this programme may be summarized as follows:
- to strengthen faculty and institutional capacities for research and training/education in seven priority areas of development policy analysis and development management and planning so as to respond better to national and community development needs;
- to develop the capacity of seven inter-institutional, multidisciplinary cross-cultural development support teams in areas of development support communications, small-scale enterprises, indigenous knowledge, environmental monitoring, participation/decentralization in development, women in development, and spatial decision support systems to conduct development project design, implementation and evaluation assignments in an effective and efficient manner; and
- to provide opportunities for Iowa faculty to participate in development-oriented activities in Nigeria leading to further internationalization and diversification of existing course curricula in Iowa institutions.
The areas of research activity were selected to take advantage of the complementary strengths of the participating institutions and reflect faculty research interests and institutional commitment, an essential aspect of sustainability. The organization and implementation was vested in the University of Iowa (at the Centre for International and Comparative Studies (CICS)) as the lead institution for the Iowa consortium and the University of Ibadan (at the Department of Geography) served as the lead for the Nigerian institutions.
The planning and implementation of activities had been based on and greatly facilitated by a series of Development Advisory Team (DAT) training workshops and seminars held in both Iowa and Nigeria. The purpose of these DAT workshops was to train multidisciplinary development support teams consisting of US and Nigerian professionals with a full range of project planning, management, implementation, monitoring, and team performance skills. More specifically, each research team used the workshops for project identification, design and implementation, as well as the needed institutional capacity building in the participating Nigerian institutions (Abumere, et.al, 1997). It was in the course of these workshops that two of the teams, Environmental Monitoring and Management (EMM), and Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) decided to merge and build their activities around a common technology, Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The EMM group was concerned with monitoring and evaluating environmental aspects of development projects, including the development of efficient strategies for collecting and managing environmental data which would lead to the establishment of an environmental information system based on GIS and Remote Sensing technologies. The SDSS team focused on the development and implementation of a research and training programme based on GIS/spatial decision support systems to facilitate locational analysis of essential services and the establishment of a GIS laboratory at the Department of Geography, University of Ibadan
The University of Ibadan demonstrated commitment to the project on the one hand and to the building of the laboratory on the other by voting nearly N100,000.00 ($US4,545.00) for the provision of air-conditioning equipment, and burglar proofing to the doors and windows of the room provided by the Department of Geography for this purpose. The USAID Office in Nigeria also provided a grant of N110,000.00 (or $US5,000.00) to decorate and furnish the laboratory.
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