The federal government has cut the fees publishers pay to have their textbooks assessed and ranked, and ordered refunds for those who paid under the old, higher rate.
This move, according to Salisu Shehu, executive secretary at the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), who announced the change in a statement on Wednesday in Abuja, is designed to soften the cost of complying with the incoming National Textbook Ranking System.
The executive secretary explained that the per-page assessment fee drops from N2,000 to N1,500, while the ranking fee for each textbook title falls from N1 million to N750,000; and that both changes take effect immediately.
Shehu said the reduced charges are meant to ease the burden on publishers and authors as they go through the council’s new evaluation process. He added that publishers who had already paid the old N2,000-per-page rate would be refunded the difference, though NERDC is yet to release details on how the refunds will be processed.
Going forward, all payments for textbook submissions should reflect the new rates, the council said, urging publishers, authors and other industry stakeholders to fall in line with the revised fee structure.
The price cut lands just as the federal government prepares to roll out the National Textbook Ranking System, a reform championed by Tunji Alausa, the minister of education, aimed at tightening quality control over the instructional materials used in Nigerian classrooms.
From September 2026, the policy will require that only textbooks assessed, approved and ranked by NERDC be used in schools; titles that haven’t gone through the ranking process will be locked out of classrooms entirely.
Alausa has argued that NERDC approval alone is no longer enough of a filter. Under the new regime, every approved textbook will still face a separate, more rigorous evaluation and ranking by expert committees before it can be recommended for classroom use, part of a broader push to weed out substandard materials from the market.
The ranking system is one strand of a wider set of reforms the ministry of education is pushing under the Renewed Hope Agenda, alongside nationwide learning assessments, the revival of unity college e-libraries, expanded digital learning infrastructure, and efforts to tackle learning poverty, a problem the government says affects roughly 42 million Nigerian children.
Officials say the ranking policy should ultimately raise the bar for educational publishing and ensure Nigerian classrooms get access only to the best available instructional materials.
