About CTRI
Free, open textbooks for Nigerian secondary-school students, written by volunteers and reviewed before release.
Building outside the market
The textbooks that exist in Nigeria are not the problem. The students who cannot reach them are. CTRI exists to close that gap.
What CTRI is
CTRI is the Collaborative Tutorial Resources Initiative of Care for Knowledge (CFK), a Nigerian nonprofit that works to improve access to quality educational resources. We write, review and publish free, open textbooks for senior secondary students preparing for WAEC, JAMB and NECO.
We start with five subjects: Mathematics, Agricultural Science, Biology, Physics and Chemistry.
Three barriers
- Cost. Good textbooks exist, but many families cannot afford them.
- Context. Free resources exist, but most were written for students somewhere else.
- Register. Even good books can sound like a formal lecture. That is a barrier too.
These barriers add up, and they fall hardest on students in places that are hard to reach.
What makes CTRI different
Written for Nigerian students, by people who know Nigeria. Examples, pictures and stories come from places students recognise.
Conversational, not stiff. A CTRI book sounds like a knowledgeable teacher explaining something to you.
Ready for the real exam. Before and while writing, we study how past questions are actually set. Real exam questions in our books come with an exam-condition approach and how marks are earned. Real past papers live on WikiQuestions, and we point to them instead of copying them.
University students as writers. People close in age to the readers remember what it felt like not to understand something.
How a chapter is made
A volunteer writes a topic. Two different reviewers read it against sources. An editor releases the chapter with a version number and a note on what changed. The public site shows only released chapters, and every chapter shows its status, so a book with one finished chapter does not pretend to be complete.
Free to use
The books are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You can read, download, print and share them with credit, for non-commercial use. The site sets no cookies, and your progress stays on your device.