Perspective on the Nigerian
Study Abroad Market by an
Experienced Agent & Student Counsellor
If you are thinking of investing into the study abroad market in Nigeria, I hope this insights shared by a major player helps your decision making. Happy reading.
As we
highlighted earlier this year, Nigeria is a country to watch for anyone
involved in international higher education. For starters, there are statistics like
these:
- With
roughly 169 million people and growing, Nigeria could be the world’s third
most populous country by the end of the 21st century, according to UN
projections;
- Nigeria
has the world’s tenth largest oil reserves;
- Its
GDP growth has been around 7% for the past few years, as compared to 2.8%
in the US in 2012 and less than 1% in the UK.
Nigeria
is definitely a country with potential, but also one with insufficient
educational capacity to prepare its students to find work in Nigeria’s economy
– and/or the global one – as we will explore later in this article.
Today
we’re pleased to present an interview with Felix Adedayo. Mr
Adedayo explains the reasons behind Nigerian students’ strong interest in study
abroad, outlines the areas of study most in demand, and provides advice for
foreign educators recruiting in Nigeria.
Why such intense demand for study
abroad among Nigerian students?
In 2013, World
Education News and Reviews (WENR) reported:
“After
Morocco, Nigeria sends the most students overseas of any country on the African
continent, according to data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS). The
UIS pegged the total number of Nigerian students abroad in 2010 at just under
39,000, although anecdotal evidence from education watchers in Nigeria would suggest
that the number is considerably higher, with many students taking up places at
private institutions in neighbouring countries, with Ghana reportedly being
particularly attractive.”
Mr Adedayo explains that a key reason Nigerians are so eager to
leave the country to study is a lack of domestic capacity at Nigerian
universities, despite the government’s efforts to expand the number of
university places open to Nigerian students.
It is not
surprising that the government is being hard-pressed to keep up with demand;
according to WENR, “at the tertiary level alone, the number of students has
grown from under 15,000 in 1970 to approximately 1.2 million today.”
Mr
Adedayo notes that every year, there are about 1.5 million students looking for
undergraduate placements alone – but there are only half a million places
available. Given this disparity, Mr Adedayo says that every year, nearly one
million Nigerian students look for admission to foreign higher education
institutions.
Scholarships abound,
especially for Engineering-minded students
Scholarships
to foreign universities are one way Nigerian students are able to receive the
quality education they need. Mr Adedayo estimates that there are about 50,000
scholarships a year for Nigerian students wanting to study abroad, some at the
federal level and some at the regional/state level – especially in oil-rich
Nigerian states. Many of these scholarships are targeted to key labour market
areas for which Nigeria needs talented graduates – engineering, for example,
especially as it relates to chemical and petroleum technologies. Mr Adedayo
notes that these same fields, as well as medicine and IT, are in general the
most popular among Nigerian students looking for foreign degrees.
Australia
seems to be one destination country benefiting from Nigerian students’ study
abroad demand and study interests: the Financial Review reports that in
2014 nearly twice as many Nigerians are studying in Australia as last year,
“many of them engineering students planning to work in their country’s oil
industry.”
One
Australian engineering university, University of New South Wales (UNSW), is
keenly aware of the potential of Nigeria as a source country. Aleksandr
Voninski, UNSW’s executive director, international, quipped: “It’s a zero to
hero market.” He told the Financial Review that Nigeria is moving ahead
of major sending markets such as Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan, and that next
year, Nigeria will likely be among Australian universities’ top 10 source
countries for international students.
Canada,
the US, the UK, and other European countries are also taking a more active
recruitment interest in Nigeria. AllAfrica reported last year on the
ways in which Canada is trying to attract Nigerian students; the opportunity to
work during and post-study completion is one of the advantages Canada promotes
in its efforts.
In the
UK, Iain Stewart, British Parliament member, estimates that 30,000
Nigerian students will be studying in various universities across
the United Kingdom by 2015.
Overall,
the most recent UNESCO data show the following countries, in order, as the
destination markets with the most Nigerian students enrolled:
- UK;
- US;
- Ghana;
- Malaysia;
- South
Africa;
- Canada.
Growing incomes another driver of
students’ interest in study abroad
Nigeria’s
booming growth rate has led to a sharp increase in the number of Nigerian
families able to fund students’ study abroad ambitions. It is one of the
reasons that, according to UIS, the number of Nigerian students at overseas
institutions grew 71% between 2007 and 2010. Mr Adedayo guesses that about 95%
of Nigerian students going abroad are able to self-fund their studies.
Demand is
everywhere, and not just for
English-language
courses
Asked if
Nigerian students are primarily interested in English-language instruction, Mr
Adedayo responds that this trend is changing. He notes robust interest in
European study destinations and growing interest in learning such languages as
French, Spanish, and German.
He also
strongly advises foreign schools wanting to recruit in Nigeria to look beyond
the financial hub of Lagos. His agency has offices in Abuja, Ilorin, and Lagos
and he lists off roughly Ten Nigerian Cities that would be worth having a
presence in, and laughingly adds that it wouldn’t hurt to target cities in
rich, oil-producing regions.
Much remains to be improved on
the domestic front
As
exciting as the demand for foreign university places among Nigerian students is
in some ways, it is also a result of a domestic education system under stress.
The poor quality of education available to most – not to mention how inaccessible
education is to millions of Nigerians – is so problematic that Nigerian
employers are having trouble finding qualified workers and this is a major
factor in a huge youth unemployment rate. University World News reports
that a British-funded study, Universities, Employability and Inclusive
Development, on four African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South
Africa – found that the unemployment rate is as high as 23.1% for Nigerian
graduates with first degrees.
The
report noted:
“With the
partial exception of South Africa, other African countries lack strong
information on the labour market, on transitions from university to work, and
on the link between disciplinary area and employment prospects.”
Beyond
problems at the tertiary education level, there are also serious issues within
Nigeria’s secondary school system. In 2013, only 44% of high-school-aged
Nigerians were enrolled in school – 21 percentage points below the global
average – which helps to explain stubbornly low levels of youth literacy in the
country. Enrolment rates, particularly among girls, are low in the north of the
country (where the notorious Boko Haram kidnappings have taken place).
Looking to the future
In a
fascinating CNBC Africa interview, Milan Thomas, a Programme Associate at the
UNESCO Results for Development Institute, says his organisation has determined
that there are 10 million students “out of school” in Nigeria. Apart from
humanitarian costs, Mr Thomas says this has a negative economic impact per year
of 1% of GDP, or US$3 billion dollars. Because uneducated youth go on to earn
significantly less as they enter the labour market, Mr Thomas says, they
represent a huge source of untapped potential for the Nigerian economy. He
notes that there is an exciting possibility for providing traditionally
hard-to-reach out-of-school students are “innovative education solutions such
as open distance learning or low-cost private school alternatives, which are
rapidly spreading across Africa.”
For now,
it is good news that an increasing number of Nigerians are taking advantage of
scholarships and/or greater family incomes to obtain quality education in other
countries to overcome the capacity and quality issues in their own education
system. The next stage will be for Nigeria to strengthen its own education
system, perhaps with the help of the “innovative” technologies and
infrastructure Mr Thomas references in the CNBC interview. Toward that goal,
CNBC also reported in March 2014 the promising development that the government
has allotted over US$6 billion dollars to the education sector in the next four
years.
Credits: http://goo.gl/lF6p9C
