Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has disclosed that with the right platforms, young Nigerians will always rise up to national and global challenges, while finding solutions to them through innovation and technology.
Osinbajo’s spokesman, Laolu Akande, in a statement on Thursday, September 15, in Abuja, said the vice president delivered a pre-recorded keynote remarks at the Yaba College of Technology (YabaTech) N50 billion Endowment Fund Launch in Lagos.
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The vice president said that, in addition to government funding, there must be robust private sector interventions to further drive world-class, ground-breaking research and cutting-edge innovation in the country’s higher institutions.
Institutions of higher learning proving ground for our best ideas, the birthplaces of innovation, and ground-breaking research.
They are also to all intents and purposes designed to guide and nurture a society’s pathway into the future.
Research and inquiry may lead to revolutionary discovery or lead nowhere; either way, the process is expensive and can only depend on large sums of patient capital.
How do you fund world-class, relevant, cutting-edge higher education sustainably?
The question has even greater resonance in Africa where public resources are low and the poverty levels put access to quality education beyond the reach of many.
On Discoveries
Osinbajo said endowments had helped to drive some of the most important global discoveries across different sectors.
According to him, YabaTech is one of the best institutions to use as proof of the concept that Nigeria can indeed develop world-class higher institutions for innovation, and research using both private and public-sector finance.
The N50 billion ambition of this endowment fund mirrors your vision for this great institution and demonstrates your keen awareness of what is truly at stake.
And we must approach this with a sense of mission and duty.
We must augment government’s finest intentions with our individual and collective desire to see us do better, to see Africa do better; to see our children step into global arenas of enormous and unprecedented opportunities.
One thing is clear, young Nigerians will always rise to the stature of the challenges the world presents them, and even beyond, if we continue to provide a platform for them to stand on.
