30,000 Nigerians have benefitted from Commonwealth Scholarships – Minister

No fewer than 30,000 Nigerians have benefited from Commonwealth Scholarship since its inception in 1959.

The Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, who was represented by Mr Sonny Echono, Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Education made this known in Abuja at the launch of the 2021/2022 Nomination Interview of Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan (CSFP).

Adamu said that majority of the award holders from the country had returned to make significant contributions to the development of the nation, mostly in the tertiary institutions.

He said the idea of the scholarship was to make scholars acquire the requisite knowledge as well as skills, and return to their respective home countries to make meaningful impact in their various fields of study.

“Education, as we all know, is critical to the achievement of the present adminstration’s transformation agenda which is expected to accelerate economic growth, engender social change, create a stable polity and improve on the quality of life of the Nigerian citizenry. This can only come to fruition through human capital development.

“Consequently, the education sector has been saddled with the responsibility of propelling our country to the realisation of her development goals so as to become one of the top economies of the world and improve access to tertiary education.

“I have no doubt that all candidates in this nomination interview have done research on Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC), its mission, vision and guidelines among others,” he said.

Adamu, however, noted that applications had been limited to PhD candidates based on instructions from the CSC.

He added that applications would be graded based on academic merit, quality of research proposal and development impact on completion of the study as PhD candidates.

Speaking, Hajiya Ndajiwo Asta, Director, Federal Scholarship Board, said that the emergence of the challenges caused by Covid-19 pandemic, candidates for 2020 were advised to defer their scholarship to 2021.

Asta noted that in 2020, there were 336 offers made to the 54 commonwealth countries with an average of six per country.

She also said that 4,424 candidates applied through the EAS, saying that Nigeria received a total of 24 awards, due to high quality of candidates presented.

Emmanuel Ukoh