TO ensure that Nigeria graduates continually remain competitive in the global market especially in the oil and gas industry, the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists-University Assistance Programme (NAPE-UAP) has announced activities for its 2010 Leadership Forum in which issues affecting geoscience graduates will be addressed, even as the Executive Secretary of National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Julius Okojie is expected to deliver the keynote address. The three-day yearly programme, which will be chaired by Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University, Prof. Michael Faborode is scheduled to commence with a dinner parley tomorrow February 18, 2011, while the main event kicks-off on February 19 and 20, 2011, at Peninsula Hotel and Towers, Lagos by 8.00am-9.00pm. With the theme of this years forum; Skills Impacting Employability of Recent Geoscience Graduates from Nigerian Universities, targeted at gathering ideas and strategies from both academia and the industry on ways to arrest decline in the performance of geosciences graduates from Nigerian universities, competing for employment opportunity in the oil and gas industry, the President of NAPE, Mr. Jide Ojo (FNAPE), stated that there can be no better time to engage stakeholders in the discourse than now. He expressed that he is excited about the theme, as it will provide us a platform to examine how significantly, skills or a lack thereof, can affect the ability of a Geoscience graduate to secure gainful employment. Noting that the forum, which is the 11th edition has over the years contributed to policy formulation and stabilisation through its intellectual discourse on issues that bothers on education sector, the Chairman of NAPE-UAP, Mr. Wasiu Odufisan said UAP Leadership Forum provides an avenue for knowledge and experience sharing between the industry, government and academia to jointly develop a working strategy to enhance geosciences education in the country. He believed that it is their duty to identify a gap and then fill in the gaps through intellectual discourse after which communiqué will be distributed to appropriate quarters, and all of these, he added are geared towards ensuring that our institutions have rich curriculum that will produce graduates, who are competitively developed. On the successes recorded so far, he highlighted that NAPE has maintained an excellent collaboration with NUC and the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) over the years. During this period, we have achieved successes in improving the falling standard of education in Nigerias institutions through active intervention programmes such as award of financial grants ranging from ten thousand to one hundred thousand to qualified students for their research support. We also collaborate with oil and gas companies in donating equipment, books and other learning materials for teaching and research work in over 37 tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Our members also volunteer to teach as guest lecturers in our universities to develop and expose our academic to current knowledge and cutting edge technology, he explained.
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