Kaduna – The Rector, Kaduna State Polytechnic, Dr Mohammed Ibrahim, on Thursday called on the private sector to improve on the entrepreneurial skills of students by commercialising their research projects.
Ibrahim said that commercialising the research projects would provide the students with the technical and vocational know-how required for the nation’s technological advancement and industrialisation.
The rector told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kaduna that rather than dump such research studies, their commercialisation would also go a long way to encourage the students to be self-reliant, a development with the capacity to create jobs.
“As a technical institution, ours is essentially to train the students and provide them with the relevant skills so that they can prove themselves technologically and be self-reliant.
“But our students have gone beyond that; they are not only showing that they can be self-reliant; they equally will be assisting communities in addressing fundamental problems.
“These projects are essentially students’ initiatives and we believe that they can be commercialised.
“We are imploring the private sector particularly, to come in and invest in these projects.
“If we encourage them to improve in their entrepreneurial skills, it will impact significantly so that they can graduate to be self-reliant and not be a burden to the government or to anybody else.
“We don’t want to graduate paper qualification students or people looking for jobs.“
Ibrahim said that the polytechnic’s Entrepreneurship Action in Us (ENACTUS) team, which emerged winner of the national students’ entrepreneurship competition, would represent the country at a global entrepreneurship event in South Africa in October.
He said that the ENACTUS competition, which began in 2004, was designed to provide students with a platform on which to showcase, in practical terms, what they had learnt in school.
According to him, the initiative challenges students to think of how to proffer solutions to the socio-economic problems in their communities. (NAN)
