Nigerian Varsities Deploy Ribara to Track Skills Formation, Boost Employability

Funmi Ogundare 

Tertiary institutions across Africa are beginning to experiment with Ribara, a digital employability platform designed to make visible how human capital is actually formed inside universities.

At a moment when graduates outnumber formal job openings in many African economies, several institutions, including Covenant University, Landmark University, Mountain Top University in Nigeria, Palm University College in Ghana, and Embu University, are exploring how the platform might help them measure and strengthen students’ readiness for the labour market.

Rather than relying on graduate surveys or anecdotal employer feedback, the system maps university courses against more than 80,000 structured job roles and their underlying task architectures. The aim is to identify where skills are formed, where they are assumed, and where they are missing.

A Professor of Digital Infrastructure and International Security, Covenant University and co-founder of Ribara, Dr. Ada Peter, said the platform’s core value lies in curricula intelligence.

“Institutions seeking to improve the competitiveness of their graduates can use Ribara to see at the course level where employability is gained or lost,” she said. “Faculty members can update syllabi in line with industry shifts and emerging skill requirements.”

The premise, Peter stated, reflects a broader structural tension in higher education where universities still teach largely at the level of degrees, employers hire at the level of tasks and Artificial Intelligence systems increasingly operate at the level of granular tasks.

“AI is not simply eliminating jobs,”  Peter said. “It is decomposing them. Work is shifting from role-based abstraction to task-based validation.”

In that shift, she argues, there is no infrastructure connecting what universities teach, what employers demand and what AI can automate. Ribara positions itself as that connective layer.

Installed at governance level, the don said the system functions as a multi-tenant intelligence layer, generating institutional dashboards that map curricula against live labour-market data, flag skill formation gaps in real time and measure AI exposure risks across academic programmes. 

“The Infrastructure then produces  dynamic employability intelligence, data that can inform reform at faculty, departmental and university scale,” Peter said.

Developed by higher-education researchers and practitioners trained across African and global institutions, including Harvard University and Covenant University, Peter stated that Ribara has also collaborated with professional bodies such as the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria  ( APWEN) to help align academic training with industry expectations.