WOLE BALOGUN, Ado-Ekiti
The Federal University Oye-Ekiti, (FUOYE)’s Faculty of Sciences has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), with South Africa’s Vaal University of Technology (VUT), to enhance research, exchange of academic programmes and capacity building among staff and students of both institutions, among other things.
The development was a concluding phase of the 2019 FUOYE International Science Conference, organised by the Faculty of sciences under the leadership of the Dean, Prof. Olayide Lawal, a professor of Industrial and Macromolecular Chemistry. The conference, which held for two days, was themed “Innovation and Advancement in Nanonscience and Nanotechnology.”
Speaking about the development and the vision of the institution, the Vice-Chancellor, Prof Kayode Shoremekun, promised to extend the collaboration with the MoU to other faculties and programmes to ensure widespread enhancement of human capacity among the staff and students of the institution.
Prof. Naidoo said: “The MoU will enable us to be exchanging both staff and students in research works in academic programmes such as Water Treatment, Alternative Energy, Biotechnology, and for FUOYE staff to obtain higher qualifications from VUT, that is the resources that they have in their university which FUOYE does not have. Also, we will also learn from our cultures.
“There will be widespread of knowledge that FUOYE will be getting from their university using the facilities that they have which FUOYE does not have. The way they teach and the way FUOYE teaches we will learn from each other and this will support the idea of broadening our spectrum among ourselves as Africans rather than going abroad for such,” he said.
Professor Lawal also spoke about the gains of the MoU saying:” The major objective of this collaboration is to extend our research tentacles to other universities, this time, to Vaal University of Technology because it is a university that has a very strong reputation in terms of research; we are targeting opportunities for exchange of students and staff and making our students to go there for research works.
“We are of the opinion that once this happens, there will be transfer of knowledge for enhanced productivity. It is going to be a win-win situation; the benefit will be to enhance human capacity in the sense that we know that here, the learning facilities are not so available for research but over there, they have huge facilities for research whereas we are deficient. We can send our samples for analysis or go over there to do the analysis.
We are also trying to see the opportunity of publishing together if the research involves both universities.