Free, open REST API and dataset for every Nigerian university, polytechnic, and college of education — 752 institutions with faculties, departments, and course-of-study data.
# Nigeria Tertiary Institutions API
A free, open REST API and dataset covering every Nigerian **university**,
**polytechnic**, and **college of education** — 752 institutions in total —
including their faculties/schools/departments where publicly available.
As far as we could find, there wasn't an existing open API for this — most
"list of Nigerian universities" resources are static blog posts or PDFs that go
stale within a year. This project exists to be the thing that's missing:
current, structured, versioned, and free to self-host or build on.
```
GET /api/v1/institutions?type=university&state=Lagos
GET /api/v1/institutions/ahmadu-bello-university-zaria
GET /api/v1/schools?q=Engineering
```
## Coverage
| Type | Count | Federal | State | Private |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Universities | 312 | 77 | 67 | 168 |
| Polytechnics | 200 | 41 | 61 | 98 |
| Colleges of education | 240 | 30 | 43 | 167 |
| **Total** | **752** | | | |
See `data/DATA_NOTES.md` for full sourcing, methodology,
and known limitations (which institutions publish a formal faculty/school
structure vs. which don't, why a handful of colleges of education were
excluded, etc.) — read this before relying on the data for anything important.
## Quick start
Requires Node.js 18+.
```bash
git clone
github.com
cd nigeria-tertiary-institutions-api
npm install
npm start # builds db/institutions.sqlite from data/*.csv, then starts the API
```
The API is now running at `
localhost`. No external database, no
API keys, no config — the whole thing is a ~2 MB SQLite file built from the
CSVs at startup.
```bash
curl
localhost
```
### Development
```bash
npm run build-db # rebuild db/institutions.sqlite from data/*.csv
npm run dev # start with --watch (auto-restart on file changes)
npm test # rebuild the db, then run the test suite
```
## Hosting it
This is deliberately a **statele …