UNILAG gets BOI support to provide entrepreneurship grants for students

In a bid to promote young entrepreneurs in the school, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, has announced that the institution will be establishing grants of between N1 million and N2 million to support students.

Speaking at the 3rd Biennial Conference on TOKI (Transition from Observation to Knowledge to Intelligence) held in Lagos, Ogundipe said the grant is with the support of the Bank of Industry. He said: “Students of the institution are full of brilliant ideas and there is a need to tap into these ideas to bring it to life.

“There is a need to develop their skills which will lead to innovation and then to entrepreneurship; and when it comes to entrepreneurship, we will help them register these companies,’’ he said.

The vice-chancellor said that presently the authorities had sent information to students in every field to bring out their brilliant ideas that could be commercialised and had up to 5,000 students.

Ogundipe said that the main objective of the grant was to ensure that students are not pushed out into the world where unemployment exists.

The vice-chancellor said that the university had started running programmes on the campus to help students to have the needed skills to be able to compete favourably with their counterparts.

“We also encourage the students to always visit the entrepreneurship centre as they will attend to their needs,’’ he said.

TOKI is the Biennial forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in knowledge management, Competitive Intelligence, Big Data, Semantic Web, IoT, Resource Management, Web Mining, Natural Language Processing, Interoperable and Adaptive Information Systems and Data Science.