The Federal Government has cancelled foreign training for Nigerian scholars.

The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, disclosed this at the opening ceremony of a three-day conference organised by the British Council in Abuja on Tuesday, November 26, 2024.

Alausa said scholars would henceforth be trained within Nigeria.

The minister stated that the federal government would be spending substantial money on building a simulation lab, as well as building and developing Nigerian universities.

He said: “We have just decided to cancel foreign training for scholars. The amount of money we are spending to train one scholar abroad we could use it to train 20 people here. We will be training everybody here.

“We will unleash capacity in our universities. We are going to be spending more money now on research, innovation, and also on welfare, both on our academics and non-academics.”

Alausa noted that the federal government was poised to use education to empower the youths, saying: “I have just spoken about the first component of our six-pillar agenda. The second component will be focusing heavily on technical, vocational, and educational training.”

Alausa said young Nigerians would be incentivised to go to technical college and acquire technical knowledge.

The minister added: “We will pay for their tuition as a second step, and as a third step, a master craft person, when they will get their practical training, we will pay them as well.

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“The curriculum will be 80 per cent practical on-the-job training and 20 per cent didactic, and as they are finishing, we will also give them entrepreneurial grants, not loans.”

Speaking on the education budget, Alausa said people only looked at the money on the budget without considering what the government spends on tertiary institutions.

According to him, people only look at what is budgeted to the education ministry, but not really counting the fact that it is also funding federal universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education.

Also speaking at the event, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Dr Richard Montgomery, said with the growing African population that might hit 2.5 billion by 2050, Africa needs to build strong and sustainable tertiary institutions.

Montgomery said such institutions should be able to produce skilled and employable graduates.

He said: “Africa is growing, it has a hugely young population. It is going to be 2.5 billion people by 2050.

“So you need to harness the demographic dividend, and we need to work harder to build institutions that are sustainable and resilient.

“We need to evolve higher education systems, so that they are better able to harness talent, and are better able also to produce graduate skills and knowledge, which aligned to the growing economies.”

The Star