By Jacob Kubeka (ABUJA) –
The Join t Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has conducted the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for foreign candidates desirous of securing admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions.
The examination, which was held in Abidjan, Cote d ‘Ivoire, Accra, Ghana, and Buea, Cameroon, could, however, not hold in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Cotonou, Benin Republic; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Johannesburg, South Africa; London, United Kingdom, and Nairobi, Kenya, owing to COVID-19 restrictions.
According to JAMB’s Head of Media and Information, Dr. Fabian Benjamin, “the conduct of examinations in foreign centres is part of the Board’s conscious strategies to market Nigerians in the Diaspora as well as international candidates.”
“The Board, is at the moment, exploring the possibility of having more centres with Europe and America being major targets. It is to be noted that the ranking of our tertiary institutions would continue to be abysmally low until we improve on a number of vital performance indicators,” Dr. Benjamin said in the current edition of JAMBulletin, made available to FRONTVIEW AFRICA today.
Thus, attracting international students would assist in making our tertiary institutions, especially the universities, truly universal and prepared to compete with their peers across the globe.
He recalled that the Board had, in its quest to find a seamless process that would attract foreign candidates into Nigerian tertiary institutions, constituted an Internationalisation Committee headed by Prof. Attahiru Jega and comprising very distinguished scholars, most of whom are former Vice-Chancellors, others were the representatives of the National Universities Commission(NUC), National Commission for Colle ges of Education(NCCE) and National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) as members.
“The report of the Committee was submitted to the Hon. Minister of Education, Mal. Adamu Adamu, who seeing the critical role it would play in terms of opening our institutions to the world, had reconstituted the yet-to-be inaugurated National Committee on Internationalisation also to be headed by Prof. Attahiru Jega,” Dr. Benjamin added.