How Low Budget Is Killing Our Education Sector-CEO Boldscholar Research Ltd Reveals

Chukwuemeka Godswill, a digital library consultant and an education enthusiast is the founder and Chief Executive Officer, Boldscholar Research Ltd. 

He spoke exclusively with News Rain Nigeria about Nigeria’s education sector, its progress, development, and challenges.

What is Boldscholar about?

Boldscholar is an online publishing and marketing organization that focuses on creating online global visibility and easy access to Africa’s indigenous educational contents, such as books and journals, with the intention of encouraging academic research in Africa.

Managed by Boldscholar Research Ltd, the platform is where Content Providers (authors, journal organizations) sign up and upload their contents for online access and visibility to scholars. Boldscholar gives content providers direct control over their works.

The platform pays great attention to academic journals. It focuses on aggregating academic journals by giving academic institutions and journal organizations the opportunity to manage their own journal publications by themselves on the webpages created for them on Boldscholar. Each institution or journal organization constitutes its own Editorial Board Members who handle the peer-review of its journal, and the constituted editorial board members must be published on its webpage on Boldscholar.

On Boldscholar, Content Providers (journal organizations, authors, publishers, and booksellers) have the discretion to fix price for their works.

What motivated you into the concept?

Like I mentioned earlier, the major focus is the academic journals. What gave rise to Boldscholar was my sad discovery of the paucity of indigenous academic journals in the tertiary institutions in Nigeria. I made this sad discovery while consulting for tertiary institutions in the digital library. I discovered that 99% of the journal databases deployed for tertiary institutions are foreign. The only discipline that uses a local database with local content is Law; I think LawPavlion and Legalpedia. And even so, the faculty often subscribe to LexisNexis or HeinOnline as preferences. After I made this discovery, I began to search for why Nigeria doesn’t have local multidisciplinary databases, something similar to Ebscohost, ProQuest, Taylor & Francis, Jstor, and other similar academic journal databases that can be deployed to tertiary institutions for digital library contents. Then I made a very depressing discovery, that one, a very large number of academic disciplines in Nigerian tertiary institutions do not have existing academic journals. There are some who used to have their own journals, but the journals have become extinct. When I inquired further on why their journals have gone extinct, I found out that the journals were published mainly as hard copies. And so when there were no more funds to print the journals, the publications disappeared. For others who never had any existing journal, the reasons were threesome claim they don’t have funds to print the journals, some do not know how to organize a conference to gather papers for the journals, and some do not even see the need to own an academic journal.

Now, these three reasons above are shocking to me. I do not understand why an academic discipline would not own a journal where their staff or students publish academic researches, or why those that own journals would let them become extinct for whatever reasons. An academic discipline is supposed to be a research organization. As a matter of fact, the main reason for school is for teaching and research. That is why whenever a student completes his learning, he is mandated to carry out research in the form of a project or theses and submit a copy of his findings to his department for assessment. Lecturers are even promoted on the basis of the number of research papers they have published. So how come some of these disciplines don’t have journals of their own, where lecturers and students are encouraged to publish their research findings for public consumption? Is it not shocking?

It is actually for these reasons I founded Boldscholar. Boldscholar was created to help academic disciplines, institutions and even private journal organizations own their own personal journals where their members, staff, or students publish research papers. Boldscholar provides you a free website for your journals, we even assist you to organise a conference to gather the papers, if you want us to help you with that. Through your own website on Boldscholar, you can create visibility and easy access to your journal. This will help your journal to gain an Impact Factor. The website will eliminate the cost of publication to almost zero. All you need to do is to get an ISSN from the National Library (we can help you get it faster at no extra cost), organize a conference, and gather the papers. Then visit Boldscholar.com to register your journal for free and get your own free website. And finally, you upload the content. It’s easy and cost-free. With Boldscholar the journals would never become extinct; the contents would always be seen and accessed any day, any time, and from anywhere. And most importantly, scholars and researchers would have indigenous papers to refer to for research.

How Low Budget Is Killing Our Education Sector-CEO Boldscholar Research Ltd Reveals

What Have Been The Efforts And Achievements So Far?

Boldscholar has given Nigerian institutions where they can publish journals free of charge, without fear of financial burden. Boldscholar is not just for journal organizations. The platform helps authors as well to publish and even sell their books to readers and make money from their intellectual property. We have also begun to assist tertiary institutions and journal organizations to host academic conferences online, through our licensed zoom account. Basically, we handle the conference logistics, Livestream the conference on our Boldscholar social media accounts, and also set up a website for the journal on Boldscholar so people can access the conference papers after the conference.

What are You Adding To The Initiative Right Now? What Are The Projects In The Pipeline?

We are currently redesigning the Boldscholar website. The platform will now be narrowed to host only Journals and books, with priority to journals. We are working towards becoming a journal indexing organization just like the South African-based African Journal Online (AJOL). Currently, Nigeria has no existing journal indexing organization. I look forward to seeing Boldscholar become the first journal indexing organization in Nigeria. Each year, teachers and scholars in Nigeria pay heavy amounts, both personal and government-funded fees, to international journal indexing organizations to publish on their platforms. Such funds should begin to find their ways to an indigenous organization like Boldscholar. To achieve this we will need to collaborate with the Federal Ministry of Education and its agencies, such as the National University Commission (NUC), National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), managements of tertiary institutions and other education-related agencies and organizations.

In addition to our web platform, we are working on developing a mobile app too to make it easier for our subscribers. Access to contents on the new website and mobile app will be subscription-based. E-Journals and eBooks will no longer have price tags. We encourage open access journals too. This will help the journals on Boldscholar to have a good Impact Factor.

We are also working on partnering with a good courier organization to assist in shipping hardcopy books and journals purchased from Boldscholar to customers. We have been battling with this for a long time. We believe we will get it right this time as soon as we are done developing the new website and app. By partnering with a good courier organization, helping authors to sell printed copies of their books will be easy. Authors will now let out a sigh of relief, knowing that selling printed copies of their books will no longer be a problem. Even publishers and booksellers can then conveniently set up free online stores on Boldscholar and sell copies of their works.

Nigeria Was 60 on October 1, 2020, What Can You Say About The Level of Education Development?

The education development in Nigeria for a country that is 60 years old is very poor. There were years the nation had some level of excellence in the education sector. Those years have been eroded by years of neglect. The education sector has suffered a huge neglect in the past three decades. Public schools have been neglected to a point that one would confidently say they ought not to be called schools any longer. Look at the infrastructures in the public schools; they are dilapidated and no longer enough to accommodate the number of students the schools have. Even the private schools are not properly monitored to check the quality of the facilities and teachers they have. Often times, when personnel of some of the regulatory bodies visits some of these schools, proprietors or administrators of the schools bribe them to overlook shortcomings of these schools. Teachers are overburdened to the point that a good number of the ones in public schools are equally the ones teaching in some of the private schools. I am talking about tertiary institutions. The primary schools too have a poor academic curriculum and are littered with unqualified teachers that are poorly paid. Most of the teachers in our schools, from the primary to the tertiary have no passion for the profession. It’s all about survival. This is unlike in the past when teachers had the option of going into other professions, but would rather prefer to teach. Most of the teachers in our classrooms simply have no other options, that’s they are there. And if an alternative profession comes they would grab it. They do the job grudgingly and it’s reflecting on their delivery. Look at the quality of students graduating from our schools nowadays?

Yes, there are measures our government has put together over the years to restore excellence in the education sector. Some of them include the establishment of TETFund for tertiary school funding, NUC, and NBTE for school monitoring. SUBEB too is one of the best things that have happened to our country’s education sector. However, the major problems all of these agencies and boards have are poor funding and corruption. The country budgets very poorly for the education sector and this limits the performances of the regulatory agencies.

What Area Do You Think Government Can Explore to Improve the Education Standard?

To improve the country’s education sector, the federal government will need to increase how much it budgets annually for education, at least let it get to the 26 percent recommended by UNESCO. In the 2020 budget, what was budgeted for education was 6.7 percent. What was budgeted in 2021 was even worse, just 5.6 percent of the total budget. That’s the lowest in the country’s history. How can the country’s education sector survive on such a poor budget? And this was not because of the covid-19 pandemic; it’s simply because we do not have regard for education. Such a low budget for education has been a reoccurrence in our budgetary allocations over the years.

The education regulatory bodies such as NUC, SUBEB, NBTE, and even TETFund (which handles funding), should step up their games. They need to truly begin to monitor the ways the personnel they send out on monitoring exercises execute their jobs. Most of the personnel are more interested in how much the schools would offer them during their visits than the job they were sent to do. They receive money to overlook the low standard of the schools they monitor. As a digital library consultant, I visit schools to deploy digital libraries for them, especially during accreditations. In the course executing jobs for schools, I have noticed that most of the schools, especially the private schools, often budget funds for bribery for the regulatory bodies’ teams instead of focusing on meeting the required standards set for them by the regulatory bodies. It is possible the management of the regulatory bodies do not know this because they only work with the reports the team they sent out brought back. The most shocking part is that the schools only provide facilities for the students only during accreditations. As soon as the accreditations are over, they shut down the facilities or refuse to renew them until the next accreditation. This practice is common with the ICT and library-related facilities. And oftentimes, because the facilities are meant for just accreditation, the schools do not inform students of the existence of such facilities until they expire.

I don’t even want to talk about the incessant strike by the academic and no academic staff of tertiary institutions over the years. That one has become a scourge to the education system. Sometimes their requests are genuine, but at times their requests have a touch of selfishness.

How Do You Feel Being A Stakeholder in Delivering Quality Education in Nigeria?

I feel fulfilled. This is my passion. I feel I was born for it. It gives me joy that I have created a solution to the problem of paucity of local academic journals in Nigeria. With Boldscholar, Departments, Faculties, and tertiary institutions can revive their extinct journals, or publish a new one at no financial cost. The journals will be made visible and accessible to the whole world at no cost as well.

What Do You Look Forward to Seeing Boldscholar Achieve In The Future?

I look forward to having my solution, Boldscholar, solve the problem of paucity of indigenous books and research contents in Nigeria and the whole of Africa. I look forward to seeing authors use Boldscholar to get paid for the intellectual property. I look forward to seeing the global community easily access contents coming out of Africa through Boldscholar. I look forward to the day every academic department, and faculty in our tertiary institutions begin to publish their own journals and make the journals visible and accessible to the whole world through Boldscholar. I look forward to the day our local journals become high Impact Factor journals and foreign scholars are struggling to pay and publish on our local journals like we currently pay to publish on theirs. I look forward to the day Boldscholar becomes a household name in academia.