By Emeka Aginam

Google Nigeria has extended an innovative program called Google Apps supporting programs’ (GASP)  to the University of Ibadan.

The solution, according to Google, will give  thousands of students of the university a lifetime email address with up to 25GB of storage space

The programme provides the Google Apps for Education suite (Email, Calendar, Groups, Docs, sites) and strengthens the existing ICT services of participating universities through a combination of infrastructure grants, technical consulting and training. Through the integration of Google’s tools into university processes and student life, GASP aims to increase productivity and offer cutting-edge world-class collaboration solutions to the academic world.

According to Prof Adewole,  deploying Google Apps means that students have access to a platform that offers the best integration and collaborative opportunities. He went on to add that through this deployment, he envisions all students having access to their emails from every part of the campus.”

Reacting to the new development, Ego Obi, Google Program Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa said: “We are excited and honored to be partnering University of Ibadan – Nigeria’s premier University to launch UI email powered by Google, , one of many Apps in the Google Apps for Education suite.

“We hope that this exciting development will foster better communication and collaboration within the university community enabling teaching, learning and research. We are quite confident that this tool will help expand the horizon of students, and further establish the university as one of Africa’s top citadels of learning.”

She added, “We want to get more and more Nigerians users online by improving access to the Internet and helping universities like University of Ibadan to take advantage of the Internets many opportunities aligning with its vision to be a world class institution for academic excellence. We look forward to partnering with more local universities, and encourage any interested parties to visit our website.”

So far, Google Apps for Education has been deployed in over 100 universities across sub-Saharan Africa to hundreds of thousands of students and university faculties, including South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Uganda.