UNESCO plans to expand chair programme in Nigeria

The United Nations’ Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has expressed willingness to strengthen relationship with Nigeria in development of tertiary education and expansion of its programmes.

The Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, who stated this yesterday during her visit to the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), acknowledged the relevance of the UNESCO chairs programme in promoting inter-university co-operation and networking to enhance institutions’ capacities, adding that the UN body would be willing to create more.

“We need to expand the network that we have and we will continue to support Nigeria. The ultimate renewable energy however is human ingenuity and Nigeria has a high level of it,” she said.

The Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Adamu Abubakar Rasheed, who had earlier expressed the need for the expansion of the UNESCO chairs programme in the country and how the body could help in tackling challenges being faced in the development of Open and Distant Learning (ODL) in Nigeria, was sad that only two of the five UNESCO chairs remain, which include the UNESCO Chair in Alternative Energy in Kwara State University and the UNESCO Chair in Mathematics at the National Mathematical Centre (NMC).

He, however, expressed hope that the UNESCO director-general’s visit would go a long way in reviving some of the closed chairs and open up new ones. The Vice Chancellor of NOUN, Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu, said NOUN is currently the first single mode ODL university in West African sub-region, which puts the institution at the fore-front of projecting the gospel of open and distant learning (ODL) to the rest of West Africa.

Prof. Abdalla stated that the aim of NOUN is to establish equity in educational opportunities available to Nigerians and to curtail some of the challenges of access to education.

While stating the challenges being faced by the institution, he said: “We are confronted daily by a public unsure and not quite informed of the gains and validity of open and distance education. To most of our citizens, ODL as a mode of instructional delivery remains a suspect”.

“This places advocacy at the front-burner of our needs. Consequently, we request UNESCO’s assistance in projecting and spreading the gospel of ODL as a veritable tool for university education in the 21st century.”