We train women to be employers in technology – Provost

It has been observed that enrolment into the FCE Gusau is on the increase every year, what is responsible for this?Well, it is due to our commitment to improve the enrollment through aggressive sensitization. We send our staff to our catchment states like Sokoto, Kebbi Niger, Katsina etc to sensitize parents through the local media […]

It has been observed that enrolment into the FCE Gusau is on the increase every year, what is responsible for this?
Well, it is due to our commitment to improve the enrollment through aggressive sensitization. We send our staff to our catchment states like Sokoto, Kebbi Niger, Katsina etc to sensitize parents through the local media there on the need to send their wards to school. Even here in Zamfara we sensitize parents on that. You know this college is the only tertiary institution in the country that is designed for female students running NCE programmes and owing to this, our enrollment doubled.
When I assumed office three years ago we had 2448 students but today we have about 4476 students and we are determined to improve our enrollment capacity to 10,000. Students from within Zamfara State account for about 50% of the population of students and those from neighbouring states of Sokoto and Kebbi are not forthcoming to seek for admission into the college probably because of the presence of College of Education Sokoto and Kebbi states respectively. However, we still get students from Katsina, Nasarawa, Kaduna and Benue states.

Now that your enrollment index is on the increase, do you have any plan for expansion of the institution?
We thank Almighty Allah and we thank the federal government and the former Minister of Education, Prof. Rukkayatu Ahmad Rufa’i, because she gave us all the support we needed during her time. If you go round you will see a lot of ongoing constructions in the college which we initiated and the federal government funded. We have introduced School of Primary Education which was just a department before, and it is now a full-fledged school and we have a structure that is already in place for it. We have also introduced School of Special Education for the physically challenged persons and government has supplied equipment for the school. We have renovated two laboratories for the School for Special Education which will commence operation this academic session. We also have School of Technical and Vocational Education in this college.
So in terms of structures and courses we have introduced quite a number of them. In fact we will soon commence B.Ed programme because we have concluded arrangement with the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and Federal University of Technology, Minna, to commence the programme in their names.
 
How Zamfara State constitutes about 50% of your enrollment despite the low awareness on girl-child education in the state?
You know whenever an institution is set up in a particular state that state will be the major beneficiary of that project unless if the state didn’t make a solid foundation to fill in its own quota. Secondly this state is predominantly Muslim and parents will be more willing to send their children to institutions where the students are females only. So I think this factor has greatly helped in increasing the enrollment index of Zamfara State.
There must be concerted effort to increase awareness among parents to grasp the idea of sending their children to school even if they are marrying them off immediately after completing their secondary school. I got married after my secondary school but that did not stop me from acquiring my first degree, second degree and even PhD. So there is need for the husbands to understand the significance of allowing their wives to further their education and to develop their potentials. This is a continuous struggle, in fact, it is not just in northern Nigeria, it is everywhere in the country.
If you are not well educated you will not be able to perform or compete very well as womenfolk. I want to draw the attention of husbands that wives can only fend for themselves if they are in gainful employment and for them also to succeed in proper upbringing of their children they must acquire sound education, not just education to only make them literate. That is to only make them know how to read and write, but education that can make them become useful members of the society.
 
Funding is the major challenge of our tertiary institutions in the country. Are you facing problem of funding?
Of course adequate funding is very necessary in any meaningful project and my institution is not an exception. We need funds in the provision of infrastructure. We have started things like provision of solar energy to our ICT centres and other important places. Because of the nature of electricity supply we have to look for alternative source of electricity. Power supply to any institution is very significant because we need it in the libraries, laboratories, ICT centers and so on. There is also special intervention of twin lecture theaters with solar energy and I believe these things require funds but we are grateful to Almighty Allah as we get a lot of support from TETFUND and with this support we are undertaking relevant projects in the college because our budgetary allocation alone cannot meet our enormous demands.
Internally Generated Revenue is supposed to be our major source of income and I can tell you that our accommodation fee for each student is N5,000 per annum, before it was N2,500 and there was protest when we doubled it and I had to defend myself over the increase of N2,500. The issue is that we have to pay cleaners and other domestic workers that are rendering their services to the college. Other colleges do charge N30,000 per bed space so you can see that our income is very negligible because we can’t even pay cleaners. And I can also tell you that infrastructural decay is not too pronounced in this college because we are doing a lot to address the problem.
Your institution is a technical college, how do the female students cope with the technical courses as such courses are always identified with the men folk?
Yes, this is true, we call it stereotyping. During admission we usually offer technical courses for women and sometimes their parents and husbands would come to us and say they do not want their wives or daughters to go for technical courses and we tell them that it does not mean that their wives or daughters would become roadside mechanics upon graduation. We tell them we want them to become brain workers in technology and we are training them to become entrepreneurially-minded graduates who can set up their businesses and also become employers of others.
For a girl to offer auto mechanic as a course she must know how to drive a car and our courses are geared towards self-reliance because we offer a lot of vocational courses for self-employment and our mandate is to produce qualified NCE graduate teachers for primary and secondary schools.