ACE Comms TeamNigeria’s National Universities Commission (NUC)—the country’s higher education leadership body and National Facilitation Unit for the Africa Centers of Excellence (ACE) program—has taken a decisive step toward ensuring the long-term sustainability of the World Bank’s flagship higher education initiative. This milestone comes with the launch of the ACE Alliance, a bold national platform designed to consolidate and future-proof the achievements of Nigeria’s 20 Africa Centers of Excellence.
Launched on November 3, 2025, the ACE Alliance marks a historic moment and signals a transformative era for African higher education. Over the past decade, the ACE program has demonstrated the capacity of African universities to deliver globally competitive research, build high-level human capital, and address complex national challenges. The ACE Alliance now provides a structured mechanism to sustain and scale this impact, moving the program from project-based achievements to durable institutional resilience.
Core to the ACE Alliance initiative is a comprehensive national inventory of Nigeria’s Centers of Excellence, detailing their state-of-the-art facilities, cutting-edge equipment, faculty expertise, research focus areas, publications, and transformative innovations. Beyond documenting achievements, the platform serves as a strategic visibility and matchmaking tool—positioning the centers and their host universities to collaborate with industry, provide specialized services, and engage meaningfully with government ministries and agencies for national development.
The launch brought together national leaders, development partners, university executives, and AAU, which has coordinated the ACE program in West and Central Africa since its inception in 2014. Through its regional lens, AAU, represented at the launch by its Senior Program Manager, Dr Sylvia Mkandawire, described the Alliance as a landmark move that strengthens the continent’s collective capacity to sustain excellence, deepen collaboration, and drive homegrown innovation in higher education.
“Sustainability has always been the cornerstone of the ACE philosophy. As funding cycles close, the imperative has been for governments, universities, and centres to consolidate their gains, diversify funding and build strategic partnerships for long-term impact. Nigeria has taken this call seriously by replicating the ACE model through new national centres of excellence, institutionalizing support structures, and now, through the establishment of the ACE Alliance, which, I think, is a brilliant and forward-thinking initiative that unites ACEs from both phases of the program into a collaborative network providing a platform for peer learning, research exchange, and joint innovation,” she hailed.
Her remarks were echoed by AFD Deputy Country Director, Mr. Mahamadou Diarra, who emphasized that the centres have evolved into “resilient, future-ready institutions,” and that the ACE Alliance will further enhance collaboration, align research with labor market needs, and amplify continental impact.
Nigeria’s Minister for Education, Dr. Maruf Tunji Alausa, and other national leaders praised the initiative as a proactive strategy to ensure project continuity and deepen sectoral collaboration. They affirmed that the platform aligns with Nigeria’s ambition to become a regional hub for world-class postgraduate education and transnational academic partnerships.
“The ACE Alliance is a strategic platform for synergy, shared learning, and collaboration,” Dr. Alausa said. “It will consolidate gains, enhance visibility, and amplify the voices of our Centres on the global stage.”
Executive Secretary of the NUC, Professor Abdullahi Yusufu Ribadu, framed the moment as the fulfilment of a decade-long national ambition. He described the Alliance as the natural next step in ensuring sustainability: “Today, we celebrate a vision fulfilled—a vision of African universities rising to global standards of excellence, relevance, and impact. With the extraordinary successes recorded, the ACE program’s closure is not an end but a transition into sustainability.”
The network launch was accompanied by the unveiling of a four-volume national compendium capturing a decade of the ACEs’ unprecedented transformative achievements. Hosting the highest of 20 Centres of Excellence across the program’s 1st and 3rd phases, Nigeria’s contribution to the ACE program cannot be overemphasized, delivering tangible solutions in health, agriculture, digital innovation, energy, cybersecurity, education, and food safety.
The Compendium is not merely a record—it is an African-owned repository of evidence, providing a powerful resource for universities, funders, policymakers, and industry. With prospects to expand the initiative to other countries, further strengthening regional collaboration across the continent.
Nigeria’s ACE Alliance strongly aligns with the project’s overarching objective to promote continental integration, strengthen postgraduate training, and institutionalize excellence through quality assurance, mobility schemes, and research-driven development.