A non-governmental organisation, Scholarship Aid Initiative, has offered a scholarship to 4,726 admission seekers in the country, in order to make education accessible to the less privileged.
The beneficiaries were drawn from the S/West geo-political zone of the country, including Lagos.
The African Regional President of the NGO, Dr Adebayo Oluwatosin, said 5486 candidates wrote scholarship examination for 2019 with 4,726 meeting the cut off points.
He added that over 8,000 participants have benefitted from the scholarship initiative which started off in 2007.
He said “we assist students annually depending on their performance in our examination. It’s a free program that we don’t collect money from anyone. We do it in Ogun, Lagos, Oyo, Ekiti, Edo, Osun and Ondo. We help the students get admission to universities and then we pay their tuition fees from the beginning to the end. We have successfully graduated over 8000 students from this initiative.”
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He decried the educational policy in Nigeria, saying it has continued to stifle the productivity of many Nigerian graduates. He also blamed the government for making education expensive.
“We need to change our educational policy. Let us go back to the system we were using before. Our system is the problem. Until the government is ready to change the system, like everybody is talking about, we will keep having this problem. The government know the right thing to do but they are not doing it.
“Our government has completely failed us. Many promises have been made, yet nothing has been done. They don’t care about the future of our children. Today, many of our graduates are outside there without a good job. Majority of these graduates studied irrelevant courses that are not relevant in the labour market again. ”
“Unemployment depends on government policy, there’s no light in Nigeria. How do you expect investors to come to Nigeria? We don’t have security in Nigeria. How do you expect any serious university to come here?
“Government should finance private universities and give ETF money. This way, private Universities will reduce their tuition fees if they get more financial support from the government.
“Then there is the NUC policy which is the biggest problem among them all. The government will ask you for 100 hectares of land to establish a private University, 200 million naira bank draft, 5 million processing fee, 1 million application fee. Apart from that, there are other things you’ll do which is even internal. Those things are making education expensive. The government have to take a cue from what is obtainable abroad. Until the government can review and change all these policies, things can’t work out,” he submitted.
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