It is distributed widely in Central and Eastern Africa, from Chad in west to Somalia in east and Tanzania in south.

[1] The Nubian woodpecker was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Nubia.

[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Picus nubicus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

[4] The Nubian woodpecker is now placed in the genus Campethera that was introduced by the English zoologist George Robert Gray in 1841.