Presidency

Osinbajo: Govts can solve social challenges through education

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo says more opportunities would be created to find solutions to the social issues and challenges in the world by deepening educational cooperation and facilitating collaboration in critical areas such as entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology.

Osinbajo said this during a meeting with senior administration officials and researchers at Carleton University, Ottawa in Canada on Tuesday.

According to a statement issued on Wednesday by his spokesman, Laolu Akande, the Vice President said despite several societal challenges, “one of the things that we have seen is that our major social issues can be resolved by people who are thinking about it and have opportunities to reason it out, especially those who can stand aside and look in from the outside and think about it.”

He stated that the collaboration between Carleton University and universities in Nigeria was one of the ways of providing solutions to some of the social challenges.

“The idea of an actual involvement with the University system in Nigeria, such as the University of Lagos and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as well as secondary schools like the Atlantic Hall, and others, are important because they provide an opportunity for sustainable long-running relationships.

“The collaboration is one that can yield the sorts of incredible benefits that we hope we can get.

“We are also talking about the education of children; we have a major challenge with out-of-school children. We now have a radio school programme, an initiative of an NGO (reaching 55,000 children). Many of these children listen to radio in some parts of the country where radio is the major means of communication.

“We could do much more, in deepening that, using technology, and looking at scaling them up. The challenges and the issues we have to confront are huge, so solutions will need to be on that scale too,” Osinbajo said.

Also speaking at the meeting, the President of Carleton University, Benoit-Antoine Bacon, embraced the “opportunity to deepen our partnership with the beautiful country of Nigeria.”

The Vice President was accompanied by the Nigeria High Commissioner to Canada, Ambassador Adeyinka Asekun; and other members of his delegation.

The Star