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At the start of every school day, Martha Ayuba marks the attendance register of her class of about 50 pupils in Nassarawo Primary School, Jimeta-Yola, in Adamawa, northeastern Nigeria. The 38-year-old is the class teacher of Primary 3B. With a pencil in hand, she calls out names from the register. Each pupil answers, “Present, Ma”, before she ticks the box next to those who are “present” and crosses those who are “absent”.

Her worn attendance book is stuffed with handwritten names, erased marks, and faded ink. A leaking roof threatens to soak its pages, and a scurry of termites could erase weeks of work. Marking attendance is not just a routine; it’s a promise of accountability, and it appears on the report card at the end of each term and in the school’s database. 

However, across Nigeria, this ritual of paper and pencil is increasingly out of step with the country’s emerging Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), a national effort to build interoperable digital identity, payments, and data systems that serve citizens at scale.

Nigeria’s education system faces a tragic paradox: millions of children remain out of school, yet even those who attend often lack basic record-keeping and support. According to UNICEF, one in four primary-school–age children in Nigeria (about 10.5 million children) are not enrolled in school. In rural areas of Adamawa State, for instance, years of conflict and poverty have made schooling precarious.

At Nassarawo Primary School, Martha juggles teaching and attendance record-keeping duties. 

“There was a time when rain fell, and the register got wet,” she recounts. “I lost almost an entire term’s record, and no one could tell how many students were in class during those periods. I had to get another register and start afresh. Imagine if I didn’t have a backup?”

Several schools in Nigeria, including some public tertiary institutions, still rely heavily on manual recordkeeping, as Olubayo Adekanmbi, the CEO of Data Science Nigeria, notes. 

For Martha, that means precious minutes of class are spent on paperwork. This drudgery breeds frustration. “I know these kids by heart,” she says, “but we have to write it down. Otherwise, next year the next teacher won’t know what happened to them.” She keeps one copy at school and one at home, fearing theft or damage. Yet neither copy can travel with her if the children move to a different school or state. Even a single register lost in a fire or flood can erase months or years of history.

Why paper recordkeeping fails

Manual registers not only burden teachers; they distort national planning.

In Nigeria’s basic education subsector, school funding, teacher allowances and student support programmes all hinge on accurate attendance and enrolment data. Each child “counts” not just for classroom pride but for allocation of resources. For example, the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) earmarks School-Based Management Committee (SBMC) funds (for feeding programmes, sanitation, and learning materials) based on pupil numbers. In 2024, UBEC disbursed SBMC – School Improvement Programme support funds to 1,171 schools in all 36 states. 

If Martha’s register fails to reflect every student, such support might not reach deserving children. A missing name in the data could mean missed school meals, missing textbooks, or even being excluded from government scholarship programmes. Hence, school officials cannot adjust to “changing patterns in attendance” or identify which children need support.

Beyond individual schools, the absence of reliable data hampers policy and planning. At best, education officials compile annual school census figures, but these are months old and riddled with errors. Many rural schools report at a snail’s pace, if at all, because principals must physically carry piles of handwritten forms to local government offices. 

Recognising this gap, Nigeria has begun transitioning toward a national Education Management Information System (EMIS) built on District Health Information System Version 2 (DHIS2). An overview of the UNICEF-supported says Nigeria is “moving from fragmented, manual processes to a unified, digital platform”, aiming for “real-time, accurate data for evidence-based planning and decision-making”. 

In plain terms, that means that if Martha could click an app on her smartphone to log her attendance, higher-ups could see up-to-the-minute figures: student dropouts, teacher absences, resource gaps, and everything else. Real-time school data would highlight, for instance, which classes are short on books or which districts have the most teacher vacancies.

What Nigeria is doing

The Nigerian government has taken tentative steps toward digitisation. 

In 2024, UBEC launched a digital quality assurance platform to evaluate schools electronically. This system is designed to stream data on school infrastructure, teacher qualifications, and learning resources into a centralised dashboard, replacing laborious paper inspections. Although the platform is operational within UBEC’s inspection and monitoring system, nationwide adoption is still scaling up as infrastructure, connectivity and digital capacity in schools improve.

Similarly, the Federal Ministry of Education unveiled the Nigeria Education Data Initiative (NEDI) to build a “single, secure platform” of educational data across basic and tertiary levels. 

NEDI aims to “leverage the National Identity Management Commission’s (NIMC’s) unique identification number” – the national ID, “for accurate student tracking”. In other words, each child’s attendance and progress would be linked to a lifelong digital ID, so that Martha’s tallies could follow her students even if they moved schools or states.

At the state level, pilots are underway, but slow. 

A consortium led by HISP Nigeria and UNICEF is rolling out a District Health Information System Electronic Management Information System (DHIS2 EMIS) module in twelve states, including Adamawa, to “improve education planning and outcomes for millions of children”.

Local education authorities have been trained to use tablets and smartphones to enter enrolment, attendance, and infrastructure data directly into the system. In Bauchi State, for example, ministry officials held workshops for local supervisors to practice uploading school census data via mobile devices. 

Complementing government action, non-governmental organisations and agencies have jumped in. For instance, Data Science Nigeria helped launch the Gates Foundation-funded EdoCert, a digital certificate registry piloted in Edo State. EdoCert uses Sunbird, an open-source, “digital public good” to archive students’ exam results and transfer credentials online. EdoCert has since secured 1.9 million paper certificates since its launch. Its developers emphasise that the same approach could be used for attendance records. Experts point out that collecting comprehensive data could help “better track and adapt to changing patterns in school attendance” and guide the allocation of resources such as the national school lunch programme.

Meanwhile, other partners focus on connectivity. 

UNICEF’s GenU9ja initiative, local telecos, and the Federal Ministry of Education are racing to wire schools to the internet. By early 2025, more than 1,000 public schools had been connected via routers and provided with devices for digital learning, according to UNICEF. Training modules have been rolled out to thousands of teachers on basic computer skills and e-learning platforms. These efforts aim to lay the foundation for any future digital register: after all, you cannot click an app without power or Wi-Fi.

Even so, Martha and her peers remain on the front lines of a slow handover from paper to digital. 

Lessons from elsewhere

Nigeria is not alone in this challenge. Across Africa and the global south, educators have confronted broken attendance systems with creative digital fixes. In Rwanda, for example, the Ministry of Education introduced a mobile attendance app for teachers in 2025. Teachers simply log in and tap each day’s present students. The app immediately flags prolonged absences so that counsellors can intervene before a child drops out. At the end of 2025, more than 2,300 schools were enrolled in the system, and the government hopes that rapid data collection will reduce dropout rates. Rwanda’s example shows that with modest smartphones and training, even large rural systems can leapfrog paper. 

In India and Uganda, UNICEF piloted a simple SMS/voice system called EduTrac. Community monitors phone schools daily to collect attendance via interactive voice-response or text. Since school records can be altered later, EduTrac’s immutability ensures honesty: once a teacher reports numbers, they cannot be changed. In India, EduTrac covered over 15,000 schools across four states by 2015. Cluster coordinators, each overseeing about 20 schools, used it to verify reports and spot chronic absenteeism. 

The system required only basic phones and connectivity, making it ideal for remote villages. UNICEF noted that EduTrac has cultivated a culture of accountability: teachers and school heads know their numbers are being checked in real time.

What needs to change

Nigeria needs a pragmatic overhaul of its attendance system. Obaloluwa Ajiboye, an innovation governance specialist who has worked at the African Union, UNDP, and UNICEF, said one practical way to address gaps in student tracking is to assign every child a unique digital identity built on Nigeria’s existing framework, managed by the National Identity Management Commission. 

“By linking school attendance records to a single, nationally recognised ID number, each child would retain one continuous education record, even when transferring between schools or moving across local government areas,” Obaloluwa noted. He explains that this kind of consistency is central to what DPI is designed to achieve. If properly implemented, it would allow attendance data to follow the child rather than remain tied to a specific school. 

However, Obaloluwa added that such digital solutions will fail without power and connectivity. 

Although internet penetration has increased across Nigeria, about 41 per cent of the country’s population remains offline, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission. According to Obaloluwa, the government should prioritise solar panels, school internet, and devices (tablets or laptops) for teachers.

Nigeria’s GenU9ja programme shows what is possible: it connected over 1,000 schools and trained 63,000 educators in one year. Scaling such programmes nationwide, with specific funding for data systems, is critical, Obaloluwa noted. 

Additionally, Olubayo Adekanmbi, CEO of Data Science Nigeria, noted that schools like Nassarawo Primary School should be equipped with affordable digital registers that work even without constant internet access. “Many of the needed solutions already exist: for example, Sunbird (used by EdoCert) can run on laptops or tablets offline and sync later,” he added. 

Olubayo said that the attendance register should not live in isolation. “It must feed into larger platforms (UBEC reports, state EMIS). Systems should be interconnected to include open APIs so that daily attendance synchronises with the annual school census”. In practice, that means digital systems built on standards (the way EdoCert operates).

Martha believes that “if only we had a quick way to mark attendance, I could spend that time helping the kids”. Nigeria has various frameworks and local and international support to make the shift, but how long will it take to achieve?

This report is produced under the DPI Africa Journalism Fellowship Programme of the Media Foundation for West Africa and Co-Develop.

Feb. 18 (UPI) — White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on Wednesday said that employees at the New York Federal Reserve should face punishment for publishing “the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve System.

The research published Feb. 12 concluded that most of President Donald Trump‘s tariffs are being paid by U.S. businesses and consumers. The authors said 90% of the costs are being passed on, though it acknowledged that the effect had dropped slightly as the year went on.

In an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, called it an “embarrassment” and said of the four authors, “the people associated with this paper should presumably be disciplined.”

He argued that tariffs are responsible for a higher standard of living.

“Prices have gone down. Inflation is down over time,” Hassett said. “Import prices dropped a lot in the first half of the year and then leveled off, and [inflation-adjusted] wages were up $1,400 on average last year, which means that consumers were made better off by the tariffs. And consumers couldn’t have been made better off by the tariffs if this New York Fed analysis was correct.”

Harvard Business School, Yale’s Budget Lab, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Congressional Budget Office have published similar findings, Politico reported.

“Our results imply that U.S. import prices for goods subject to the average tariff increased by 11% … more than those for goods not subject to tariffs,” the paper, written by Mary Amiti, Chris Flanagan, Sebastian Heise and David E. Weinstein, said. “U.S. firms and consumers continue to bear the bulk of the economic burden of the high tariffs imposed in 2025.”

Hassett was on Trump’s short list for Fed chair, but Kevin Warsh was chosen.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” asks German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans with a laugh during a recent video call from his home in Berlin.

As he lights his cigarette, he looks every bit the renegade artist he is known for being. At 57, Tillmans is in the midst of staging his 10th exhibition in Los Angeles since the mid-1990s at Regen Projects. He is one of the most celebrated photographers of his era, with a practice that collapses the distance between fine art and the pulse of street culture, spanning epic abstractions and the familiar textures of contemporary life.

At the same time, Tillmans has another life as a serious electronic musician, recording a series of experimental albums, including his most recent, 2021’s “Build From Here.” He is deeply connected to the music world, and photographed the cover for Frank Ocean’s acclaimed “Blonde,” making him a rare artist to be in major museums while genuinely engaged with popular music and the club scene — a bit of a rock star in his own right.

The official opening of his Regen show, “Keep Movin’,” attracted a line that wrapped around the building. Fans are drawn to his varied strands of work, which move instinctively between disparate approaches and subject matter, from famous faces to images sensitive to light and shape, in subjects as simple as the curve of paper folded softly over itself.

A security guard, right, stands near the work “Robin Fischer, Dirostahl, Remscheid 2024” in German-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ current exhibition, “Keep Movin’,” at Regen Projects.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

During an early walk-through for a few dozen invited guests, Tillmans held forth on his personal cosmos, surveying pictures from the experimental to the deeply intimate. Portraits, politically charged tabletop collages and quiet photographs that capture the simple vibrance of daily life are strewn across Regen’s 20,000 square feet of gallery space.

“I see my work evolve more in evolutions, rather than in revolutions,” Tillmans said, gesturing to a conceptual wall-sized image created with a photocopier.

His Regen show, through March 1, also features short video works and the abstractions of camera-less images he considers “pure photography,” created in the darkroom by shining light directly onto photosensitive paper. There are pictures relating to human sexuality and images from nature. Each subject and approach is an ongoing concern left intentionally open-ended, and never contained within a single project, title or grouping. They are all inseparable in his own mind, free from categories or a finite series of pictures.

“I am aware that these art historical categories exist in my oeuvre, but I’m not seeking them out,” Tillmans explained after the walk-through. His practice is not about “working through one series or genre and then moving on to another.”

Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans’ “Keep Movin’” at Regen Projects.

(Evan Bedford / Regen Projects)

On his trip to Los Angeles, Tillmans made a long-planned visit to the Mt. Wilson Observatory to satisfy his lifelong interest in astronomy. He used the giant telescope to capture the twinkling of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. This preoccupation resurfaces at Regen in a large-scale print of 2023’s “Flight Honolulu to Guam,” revealing a star field above the clouds.

Tillmans’ interest in stargazing goes back to his adolescence, and images of the moon and cosmos recur in his work. “It gave me a sense of not being lonely, seeing the infinite sky and universe,” he says. “I always felt it was a very grounding experience that all humans share. I always got something from this — besides the beauty and the formal marvel of it all — this sense of location and locating myself.”

His depiction of the heavens is just one of many threads and themes that run through his decades of work.

A piece of work personally hung by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in his current exhibition, “Keep Movin’” at Regen Projects.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Early in his career, Tillmans began shooting for the British street style magazine i-D, creating portraits of the famous and unfamous, while also documenting club life and gay culture. In 1995, Taschen published his first book, which made a stir with portraits of soft, indirect illumination, emphasizing naturalness. By avoiding the dramatic lighting and exaggerated special effects often seen in pictures of youth culture, he landed on a distinctive visual style.

“I felt the heaviness of life and the joy of life,” Tillmans says. “I saw myself as a multifaceted complex being, not just as young. So I experimented with lighting and film — how can I photograph my contemporaries in a way that approximates the way that I see through my eyes? And that was stripping back anything effectful, almost taking away the camera.”

He continues to do assignment work for magazines, which he considers part of his artistic practice. Several recent portraits are at Regen, including a foundry worker in Tillmans’ hometown of Remscheid and another of actor Jodie Foster. The editorial work brings him into contact with people and places he might not otherwise meet.

In 2000 Tillmans became the first photographer and first non-British artist to win the prestigious Turner Award. Tate Britain staged his mid-career retrospective in 2003 and the Hammer Museum in Westwood mounted his first major U.S. retrospective that same year, which traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Coming after major retrospectives at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last year and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 2022, the Regen show dispenses with the retrospective frame while quietly performing a similar task — taking in the main currents of Tillmans’ work over the past two decades, and a few images dating to the late ‘80s. His relationship with the gallery began with his first Los Angeles exhibition.

Visitors walk through photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition, “Keep Movin’,” at Regen Projects in Los Angeles.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

As ever, the images are displayed in a startling range of shapes and sizes: framed and unframed, huge wall-size prints hang alongside tiny, snapshot-scale pictures. One of the largest, “Panorama, left” (2006), spans nearly 20 feet and hangs only from bulldog clips. Smaller pictures are simply taped to the wall, but nothing is meant to indicate hierarchy.

“The biggest may not be the most important, and the smallest might be overlooked,” he explains. “It’s a little bit like projecting the way that I look at the world.”

In his first decade of exhibitions, he had no frames at all. “I taped those photographs to the wall, not as a gesture of disrespectful grunginess, but as a gesture of purity,” he adds. “That sense of immediacy — and not imbuing something with outside signifiers of value — lets the fragile piece of paper speak for itself.”

One of the current show’s larger conceptual pieces, “Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religion II,” fills a corner with 48 rectangular portrait-sized photographs, all of them solid black or dark blue. It’s a near-replica of a work shown at the Pompidou with the same solemn title, created to recognize those “physically maimed or mentally harmed” by doctrine and intolerance.

“I myself have a spiritual side,” says Tillmans, still grateful for positive experiences attending a Lutheran church in his youth. “But over the years I’ve become ever more distrustful of organized religions and seeing the role of religion in government. I find it incredibly immodest for humans to tell other humans what God wants.”

When he’s not exploring his spirituality and creativity visually, he focuses his energy on the music world. It’s a natural setting for Tillmans, who is increasingly active releasing his own electronic-based pop music. He’s occasionally worked as a DJ, and has been involved in acid house, techno and other electronic music. Despite his notoriety in the art world, he has no concern about hitting the charts.

“This is part of my work. I’m doing it the same way that I’m doing a photograph. I’m not doing a photograph to be peak popular in two months’ time,” Tillmans said. “It’s there and it’s still there in 24 years.”