81 female pupils bag APWEN scholarship in Nigeria
A total of 81 female pupils in various primary schools across the country have been awarded scholarships to study science and engineering courses up to university levels by the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN) between 2018 and 2019.
Former President of APWEN, Dr. Felicia Agubata, who disclosed this to newsmen in an interview on the activities of APWEN under her leadership, said out of the seven ultra -modern science laboratories earmarked for construction, two have been completed and equipped while work is in progress in five others.
Agubata said its partnership with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has led to the award of scholarships to the down trodden in the society including orphans in its “invent it, build it” programme.
She noted that they were a lot of less privileged children in the society seeking for help and expressed displeasure that in some communities in some states the people were not ready to provide land for the construction of science and technology laboratories.
Agubata disclosed that during her tenure, the girl -child was inspired towards taking up science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects.
According to her, the programme has been replicated in the seven states of Bauchi, Edo, Ogun, Kano, Anambra, Kogi and Borno in the six geo-political zones of the country.
The former APWEN boss said she was able to attract a UK Royal Academy Engineering Grant of £80,000 to train mathematics and engineering teachers in schools.
“We want to ensure that STEM teachers teach with the correct methodology and that they have the required skills to impart on these children because these children are the leaders of tomorrow. The grant recipient is yours sincerely, Dr. Felicia Nnenna Agubata.
“This grant will run for 12 months and we started since October; we are doing the flag -off ceremony on January 22 at the DBI Bridge Institute, one of our sponsors for the programme.
“We intend to flag -off because our UK partners is the University of
West of Scotland, they are coming to Nigeria to train us on teaching methodology and how STEM teachers can acquire skills with some STEM kits.
“We are going to do what we call train the trainer training and that will start on March 31 – April 2, at DBI; everything we are doing on this project will take at the DBI,” she said.
According to Agubata, under the train the trainers programme, 50 teachers would be trained to further spread the training to the rural communities, adding that a minimum of 200 teachers in science and mathematics would be trained across the federation while over 500 female pupils would be mentored.
“We are going to train 60 female engineers and those 60 female engineers will now train the STEM teachers. They will be able to go to our rural communities so that we will be able to cover the six geo-political zones because the UK partners may not be able to go to all these communities.
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“So, we prefer to use people who are the locals to go, so we do the train the trainers in Lagos and go the six geo-political zones.
The minimum the numbers of teachers we are going to train is 200 across the federation, but remember we have 34 chapters in Nigeria which means that if we have five people from each states who are coming for this training by the time we go to each locality we will cover more,” she added.
