The World Bank has released the first tranche of disbursement totaling N1.4billion to 10 Nigerian universities recently listed among the African Centres for Excellence.
The fund is expected to be deployed for the ACE project to shore up the ranking of Nigerian universities globally in the fields of agriculture, health, as well as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The Executive Secretary of National Universities Commission, Julius Okojie, who said this at the ACE project post-effectiveness workshop on Monday in Abuja, cautioned the benefiting institutions against compromising the objectives of the scheme.
Nigerian universities had won 10 out of the 19 slots for Africa, giving them an edge over others.
The benefiting universities include Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, as Centre for Agricultural Development and Sustainable Environment; Bayero University, Kano, as Centre for Dryland Agriculture and Benue State University as Centre for Food Technology and Research.
Others are Redeemer’s University as Centre for Genomics of Infectious Diseases; University of Jos as Centre for Phytomedicine Research and Development; and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, as centre for Neglected Tropical Diseases and Forensic Biotechnology.
University of Benin was designated as a centre for Reproductive Health and Innovation; African University of Science and Technology, Centre for Materials; University of Port Harcourt, Centre for Oil Field Chemicals and Obafemi Awolowo University, as Centre for Science, Technology and Knowledge.
Okojie said, “The success of the ACE project holds the prospect of favourable global ranking for Nigerian universities and the nation can not afford to toy with the opportunity.
“The feat of a Nigerian university which assisted in checking the spread and scourge of the Ebola Virus Disease when it broke out in the country would have ordinarily earned Nigeria a top place among world universities.”
The NUC scribe also said investigations had commenced to identify universities offering online degrees with a view to checking their illicit operations.
The ACE project was instituted in 2013 and launched in 2014 by the governments of Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Republic of Benin, Ghana, Cameroon, Togo and Senegal to promote regional specialisation amongst universities in the participating countries to address common regional development challenges.
No comments:
Post a Comment