The foundation for a N400 million ($2 million) second ICT skills acquisition centre has been laid at Babcock University, Ilesan-Remo, Ogun State, by New Horizons.
The four-storey building will contain 2,000 computers, best-in-class in-motion-biometrics (IMBM), SAP LMS Success Factor, U-Pointer among others.
The building which will be called the New Horizons/Babcock ICT Empowerment Centre will be used by undergraduates, postgraduates and those outside seeking the university’s international ICT certifications.
It is being built beside the present 1,000-capacity computer centre operated by the company. Each floor of the new building will have 500 sitter computers, including intelligent boards, multimedia projectors, networking software, international IT-E biz courses/curricula, furniture, UPS, certified instructors, international exams centre and students courseware/books. After completion, Babcock will boast of a 3,000-computer training facility which will most likely be one of the largest in any university in the world.
The chairman, New Horizons Nigeria, the world’s largest private IT training company, Mr Dotun Sulaiman, together with members of the governing council of the university, while laying the foundation for the building at the weekend, said that when completed, it will position Babcock as the premier IT learning higher institution in Africa.
“When the managing director of our company, Mr Tim Akano, came up with this project, I said let us go ahead. It is something we are extremely very proud of. I am also very proud of what we have been able to do in Babcock University with these certifications.
I can tell you from experience in my various roles in the corporate world that graduates of this university are very highly regarded. Because of the standard of education in Nigeria, after recruiting graduates from Ivy League institutions, the next best are graduates from private universities like Babcock and Covenant University. In the last 16 years of this institution, you have done a marvelous job and anything we can do to continue to assist we will do,” Sulaiman said.
Responding at the occasion, the vice chancellor, Babcock University, Professor Kayode Makinde, said, “We believe that our students are actually the centre of our lives which is what this is about. People who really have a vision don’t need persuasion to invest in a laudable project and this is what I see in New Horizons. They started with Babcock and they are everywhere now.”
On his part, Akano said that the centre will also cater for students who are in the adjoining towns and cities that will come to participate in the programmes.
“We believe that by the time it is completed, together with the 1,000 PCs centre currently in place, the N400 million ICT centre will also cater for those outside the four walls of the university by offering international certification courses that students can use after graduation to establish businesses that would fetch them meal tickets. It opens up the space for more people to come in. Right now, the job opportunities are in the ICT sector. We want Nigerians to go into software development and coding,” he said.
Akano said part of the overall vision is to make Nigeria the IT hub for Africa and the world by getting Nigerian graduates and youths in general to replicate and even beat the exploits of Bill Gates, Mack Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, etc, through development of innovative software, applications, etc, to benefit the world.
He said New Horizons with 360 centers in 80 countries of the world has been in existence for the past 34 years and has master partnership with all the world major technologies including Microsoft, Cisco, EC Council, Oracle, Adobe, Cisco, Certiport, VUE, etc.
According to him, its Nigerian branch pioneered integration of international IT and e-Business skills certifications into the academic curricula of Nigerian universities and currently has vibrant partnership with 15 Nigerian universities. In Nigeria, over the last 10 years, New Horizons has emerged the largest IT training provider – empowering about 50,000 students yearly in universities and in high schools.
Babcock University Gets N400m ICT Centre
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