ATBU Centre Of Excellence Commence Undergraduate Registration Next Week

BY KHALID IDRIS DOYA, Bauchi

Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, Sustainable Procurement, Environmental and Social Enhancement (SPESSE) Centre of Excellence will by this October commence registration of its first set of undergraduate students. 

The SPESSE Programme is coming in the wake of three critical areas of needs for not only national development, but sustainable national development, viz Procurement skills, Cadre of Officers in Maintaining Environmental Standards, as well as Officers critical in ensuring national social cohesion that should serve as catalyst for national growth and development.

The Head of the ATBU Centre of Excellence Professor Ibrahim Hassan on Monday, while speaking to journalists during graduation of students, recalled that the Federal Government through the National Universities Commission (NUC) in 2019 called for proposals and invited 24 federal universities including ATBU to bid for hosting of the programme.

Prof. Hassan said, “After series of assessments, visits, negotiations and institutional capacity assessment, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi was announced as one of the six Centres of Excellence to host this project in Nigeria”.

The ATBU Centre of Excellence leader further recalled that the genesis of the space enhancement project arose sometime in 2018 when through some very invalidant data, the Federal government together with the World Bank discovered a particular study that is lacking in Nigeria.

“So arising from this concern, the Federal Government through the Ministry of Finance and the World Bank negotiated and led to an agreement that there need be a capacity building on research through three critical areas where the need for capacity should be addressed”.

Professor Ibrahim Hassan explained that at the face end of the negotiation between the Federal Government and the World Bank, a decision was taken to quantitatively establish six Centres of Excellence in the country as part of the sustainable procurement, environmental and social standards enhancement project.

He told the journalists, “So, in essence, the centre that you are in here is one of the six centres of excellence established by world Bank and the national universities commission to deliver the mandate of training this cadre of staff to handle the issues of procurement, ethnical, issues of maintaining environmental standards, as well as issues of addressing the critical needs for us to have officers who would man our social standards”.

Hassan disclosed that the centre which will register three sets of students totalling about 1, 500 participants will acquire training on capacity building programmes, particularly to address skills gap in procurement standard, practice of environmental standard, and application of social standards, which basically are the essence of SPESSE Project.