THE Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) in conjunction with the Federal Polytechnic, Offa (Fedpoly) has organised a workshop on a four-year strategic plan to improve the road map of the institution.
Speaking at the event, chairman 2021/2024 strategic plan committee, who is also the deputy rector of the institution, Dr Augustine Adama, said that the workshop on the strategic plan was to ensure inclusion of inputs from both academic and town communities in the final copy of the plan after the completion of the draft copy.
She said that the institution had implemented its strategic plan for the year 2017 to 2020.
In her presentation, entitled, ‘Situational Analysis and Targets of the 2021-2024 Strategic Plan’ for the institution, Dr Grace Korter, who is the dean, Research and Innovation of the polytechnic, said that the plan aimed to increase the students’ population into some academic programmes that are less-populated, “when compared to some other programmes being offered by the institution.”
She gave examples of such departments that needed an improved student population to include Urban and Regional Planning, Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Estate Management and Valuation, Building Technology and Architecture.
“A method to increase the number of students in the Office and Technology Management department should be adopted going by the gross difference in its population size compared to other departments within the school of Communications and Information Technology.”
Dr Korter said that the strategic plan was also targeted at changing gender imbalance between male and female students in the institution, which she claimed to be currently affecting the female students in some programmes.
“The target should be to strategise on getting more female students into science programmes in the institution. This will help to improve the workforce for a better economy and sustainable development,” she said.
On students’ performance, the don, who said that students’ performance was at its peak between 2017/2018 and 2018/2019, added that the performance deteriorated in 2019/2020.
She, therefore, said that the target of the plan was “to identify the reasons behind the current performance and strive to overcome the obstacles as well as to minimise wastage of resources and maximize opportunities for both the students and staff.
“In a similar vein, the efforts put in to achieve success by members of staff and students should be identified and rewarded,” Dr Korter added.
In his presentation, Dr Musa Koko of the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) hailed the critical nature of the workshop and involvement of relevant stakeholders.
Koko, who said that every strategic plan should aim to improve upon mandates of a given institution, lamented the inadequate technical manpower in the country, adding that most state governments had been unable to inject adequate funding to polytechnic institutions.