Role of Education and Libraries in Developing Nigeria’s Knowledge Economy

Abstract

The knowledge economy has great potentials for Nigeria’s economic and social developments by providing efficient ways of producing goods and services using knowledge as a basic raw material. Regrettably, though knowledge is available in Nigeria, it hasn’t been developed into a factor of production. This paper’s position is that Nigeria needs to improve the quality of education and libraries if it must become a knowledge economy and attain its vision of becoming one of the top twenty global economies by the year 2020 aptly titled “Vision20: 2020. This paper examined the characteristics of a knowledge economy, role of education and libraries in the knowledge economy, the place of academic and public libraries in a knowledge economy, the factors hindering education and library services in a knowledge economy, and the way forward. The paper recommended the urgent need to set up a national and sub-national committees to among other things design Nigeria’s knowledge economy plan and its implementation strategies. Other recommendations include: increasing government’s investment in research and development by prioritizing funding for educational institutions, libraries and research centres; increasing ICT spending, promoting e-government, promoting ICT literacy through public-private partnership; creating an enabling environment by improving power supply, etc.