——The Committee of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, has announced that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kuhne Foundation to integrate logistics and supply chain into Nigerian university’s curriculum.
In a statement made available to our correspondent on Thursday morning in Abuja, The Secretary General of CVCNU, Professor Yakubu Ochefu, during the meeting with the foundation noted that seven universities had been selected to pilot the programme.
The PUNCH reports that the MoU was aimed at strengthening the local capacities in logistics and supply chain management along the different higher education levels, by developing competitive education programmes to meet international standards.
“The MOU represents formalisation of a relationship between the selected Nigerian universities and Kuhne Foundation.
“Kuhne is part of the Kuhne Group which is the largest logistics and supply chain company in the world and a global leader of logistics and supply chain company development to the world.
“This partnership that we have signed today represents their efforts in coming into the Nigeria space like they said, they have been operating basically in East Africa and now this is their first time in West Africa and the numbers justify that investment.
“Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa when you translate that into logistics and supply chain you will understand why the biggest player in the world wants to play in Nigeria,” he said.
Speaking further in the statement, Ochefu said the foundation had been engaging with the National Universities Commission in the last one year to develop a curriculum for logistics and supply chain management in Nigerian universities.
“What we have had in the past is transportation and as we all know transportation is the component of logistics and supply chain management. When they work with NUC to develop the curriculum at the undergraduate level it will be possible for you to teach in logistics and supply chain.
“What we are doing here is to help train the manpower at the postgraduate level to be able to teach at the level of undergraduate because we really don’t have qualified manpower for logistics and supply chain management to teach in the Nigeria university system.
“So part of the training programme has to build that first for this seven universities and we will take it up from there,” he said.
Also, the Country Director, Kuhne foundation, Mr Stephen Akuti, said that Nigeria must not be left behind considering the value of logistics and supply chain management to any economy.
Akuti said that the foundation had researched into why Nigerian universities do not offer logistics and supply chain management as a course.
He said that the foundation was ready to scale up it’s support for Nigerian universities in the training of manpower at the undergraduate level.
“There are a lot of value in logistics and supply chain education in the entire world generally and for the Nigeria education system.
“Basically, it is the way the world works, logistics and supply chain management in education works and we have been working in Nigeria here for five years now..
“One of the things we’ve been doing underground is to research why the programme is not available in the Nigerian educational system particularly at the undergraduate level.
“And we have seen those reasons and so we are working with NUC and other stakeholders and today now we are signing the MoU with CVCNU to move that level forward to bring those value to Nigeria.
“All our problems in Nigeria educational system and the entire economy is logistics and when we begin to research and teach the new principle we will see all of them begin to function appropriately, so basically the value is unquantifiable,” he said.
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