One of the winners of the British Academy Global Award for 2024, Prof. Olutayo Adesina, on Thursday, said the standard of education in Nigeria has remained formidable despite all challenges.
Adesina, a professor of History at the University of Ibadan (UI), disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ibadan.
According to him, the nation’s education standard still towers among other nations of the world despite the challenges within the sector.
He said winning the award negated all wrong insinuations that Nigerian education was in shambles.
“I don’t think that is true. We still have the knowledge; we have integrity and passion despite everything happening in the system,” Adesina said.
He said the British Academy Global Award started in 2018 for professors across the world to compete for grants to execute their respective projects.
He said the grants could be highly competitive and extremely difficult to get.
According to him, an interested party is expected to apply online and look for a host university in the United Kingdom.
The applicant, Adesina said, would be expected to approach the host university to strengthen his/her application before being passed through the department and faculty of the university.
The don said the application would then be sent to the British Academy Global Award where all applications across the world end up.
“Thereafter, the academy will send all applications to its assessors for assessment to select the best. For the year 2024, only eight applications were selected from the mass of applications submitted and two were from Nigeria,” Adesina said.
Speaking on his research, Adesina said it would be looking at the interface between the town and gown; the town being the city of Ibadan and the gown being UI.
“My specific topic is ‘The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century’.
“So, for the first time, we are looking at the position of the town in the relationship of the university to the decolonisation of knowledge,” Adesina said.
He said the research would be undertaken by him at the University of Manchester for four years with a grant to the tune of £879,117.
NAN reports that the second Nigerian winner is Prof. Abubakar Sule Sani with his research theme on ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back: Past and Present West African Communities Revealed through Museum Collections’.
He was awarded the sum of £892,037.31 with the University of East Anglia as the host university.
(NAN)
