Nigerian Universities Urged to Replace Fragmented Systems with Unified Digital Platforms

Nigerian universities are being encouraged to replace fragmented administrative software with unified, cloud-based platforms designed around student needs and campus operations.

The proposal comes as demand for higher education continues to rise in a country where more than 60% of the population is under 25, according to the discussion informing the recommendation.

Many campuses continue to face long registration queues, misplaced transcripts, delays in issuing admission letters and portal failures during fee-payment periods. The same account describes institutions operating separate systems for functions such as finance and admissions, while relying on manual spreadsheets for other activities.

Legacy systems create administrative pressure

Arpit Badjatya, founder and chief executive of Academia by Serosoft, said universities should consider moving directly to unified digital infrastructure instead of extending older systems that were not built for higher education.

“The question is no longer whether Nigerian universities need a digital transformation. The question is: are they infrastructurally ready to transition from fragmented software to unified ecosystems?” Badjatya said.

The discussion says many enterprise resource planning systems historically sold to African universities were developed primarily for corporate accounting. It characterises those platforms as expensive to maintain, difficult to navigate on mobile devices and poorly suited to student-centred services.

Global education technology benchmarks cited in the discussion estimate that university administrative teams spend an average of 17 hours each week reconciling conflicting information across disconnected legacy platforms. Badjatya also said institutions can spend millions customising outdated corporate systems, although no currency or exact amount was specified.

He argued that a single-database campus operating system could provide a more consistent foundation for admissions, finance and other academic lifecycle functions.

Call for a broader use of AI

The discussion also examined how artificial intelligence is being used in Nigerian higher education. Its current role has largely focused on academic-integrity monitoring, including the use of tools such as Turnitin to detect AI-generated material in essays, dissertations and assignments.

Badjatya said universities should retain their commitment to academic integrity while expanding the role of AI to practical administrative tasks. Such applications, he argued, could reduce delays and remove obstacles that affect students and university staff.

“The critical task for academic leaders is not to abandon academic integrity, but to expand their vision of what AI on campus should accomplish,” he said.

He added that his goal was to place students at the centre of the digital ecosystem, rather than treating technology mainly as a compliance or monitoring tool.

James Hope University cited as an example

James Hope University, a postgraduate business institution in Lekki, Lagos, is presented as an example of the proposed approach. The university, founded by banker and philanthropist Jim Ovia, is described as having deployed a modern, unified and AI-driven campus operating system instead of relying on traditionally fragmented information technology.

The discussion promotes purpose-built higher-education platforms, including Academia by Serosoft, as a way to connect institutional data and introduce functional AI across university operations. It does not provide independent evidence of the deployment’s results or specify the operational AI features in use at James Hope University.

Badjatya compared the possible shift to unified cloud-native systems with Africa’s earlier move from landline telephone networks to mobile communications. He said the technology needed to build more connected and intelligent campuses is already available and has been used on the continent.

“Is Nigeria’s higher education sector ready for a digital leap? Absolutely,” Badjatya said.