Key Achievements and Milestones

As the University of Nairobi marks 50 years since it was transformed into the first national University in Kenya on July 1, 1970, the ICT Center celebrates the transformative power of ICT in enhancing teaching, learning, research and administrative activities in the University of Nairobi.

The computing services for the university were for a long time offered by a technical section under the then Institute of Computer Science (ICS). The role of this technical  section was mainly to provide the entire university with computing services and provide technical support to the academic programmes offered at ICS and other courses that had computing components across the university.

The demand for computing services both by the university processes and the academic programmes grew significantly in the late 1990s and by early 2000 the university had taken steps to build capacity in the technical section that provisioned these services. In the year 2002, the University of Nairobi took the bold step to split the then Institute of Computer Science into two units; an academic unit that would focus on training computer science programmes (School of Computing and Informatics) and a service unit that would provision ICT services to the entire university (ICT Center). 

In early 2000, the University embarked on a very ambitious ICT development plan. This included expanding and inter connecting all its campuses through a high speed network infrastructure and development of various management information systems.  The networking saw the University put up a very robust system and network infrastructure that helped the University integrate ICT into teaching and learning, all campuses interconnected with wired and wireless LANs, connections to student’s hostels and development of various management information systems.

To date, the ICT Centre has ably continued to steer the University through various innovative ICT projects that continue to ensure the University remains competitive both locally and globally. Operations in the university have been made effective and efficient through developments such as;

• Students Management Information Systems – Supports student records throughout their enrolment in the university from admission to graduation
• Human resource management information system e.g.
  1. Personnel Management
  2. Payroll system
  3. Staff appraisal System
  4. Staff clearance
• University system of websites – Hundreds of websites with information about the organization units and people in the university
• Integrating ICT into teaching and Learning and  installation of WIFI network to various students Halls in Campuses
• Upgrading the University Data Centre to a Tier 3 Data Center for educational purposes
• Electronic Procurement Management System
• Management dashboard systems for effective decision making
• High speed network infrastructure in all Campuses
• Customer care systems eg Help Desk, Call Centre