A team of experts from the World Bank is in Nigeria to meet with key stakeholders on the proposal to support the emergence of ‘’Centres of Excellence’ in some African Universities.
The World Bank is considering providing support for the project in line with its mandate for the region.
A statement signed by the Chief Information officer of the National Universities Commission, Mrs. Bukola Olatunji, on Sunday said the team had already had a consultative meeting, which was organised by the NUC to discuss modalities for the project.
The statement quoted the Executive Secretary of the NUC, Professor Julius Okojie, as saying that such centres must be relevant to the needs of the countries of their location.
It said, “Executive Secretary, NUC, Professor Julius Okojie, said centres of excellence must be relevant to the needs of the country, if their objectives are to be achieved. He advised that an institution hosting a Centre of Excellence must have the relevant human and material resources required to sustain it.
“The executive secretary noted that centres of excellence evolve over time, and for an institution to qualify for such a centre, it must have existed for some years, with good learning facilities and quality research output.”
Okojie, according to the statement, challenged the 21 universities present at the meeting to remain focussed and provide what it would take to sustain the centres, stressing that first and second generation universities in the country should provide leadership in research.
He was said to have assured the universities that they had what it took to be centres of excellence in Africa and that they could count on NUC’s support.
While charging them to also be programme-focussed, Okojie decried a situation where a university would introduce a new programme and immediately began to mount pressure on NUC to start others that were closely related to it, without considering its capacity to run those programmes or NUC’s guidelines for the same.
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