Association of Professional Women Engineers (APWEN) has said that, over the years, succeeded in creating different outreach programmes to increase the numerical strength of female engineers.
APWEN urged to improve women participation in STEM
To limit dependency on foreign engineering products and manpower, engineers have called on government to initiate policies that would revive technical and vocational education in the country.
They said that building the future should be non-negotiable and driven through the use of technical, vocational education as well as industrial partnerships for local content development.
To them, despite government’s successes and efforts in the past through technical and vocational education to reduce poverty, hunger and unemployment, the challenge persists due to insufficient funding, poor state of facilities, brain drain/search for greener pastures, poor staff training and retention mechanism, static and parallel curriculum of technical education and dis-integrated educational value system.
Dr. Ibilola Amao is the Principal Consultant, Lonadek Global Services. In this interview with Funmi Ogundare, she explained why the country must equip the youths and ensure that the right human capital asset are employed in the energy, oil and gas industry so that they can create the needed value to secure the future of Nigeria
Over the years, you have been able to empower thousands of youths in the area of Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), how has Lonadek being able to use this feat to close the energy gap across the continent?
In 2005, we were engaged by a company to recruit some engineers and we realised that the skills and the type of capabilities they needed ,were not available locally. So we realised that there is a need to have human capital development initiative to bridge the gap between our universities and what the industry required. Apart from training and upskiling graduates, we also needed to look at the curriculum and mode of training, learning