Phillips Consulting Launches Scholarship Website

About 2, 000 universities in the United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK) and Sweden offer no less than 8, 000 scholarships to African students, but many of the beneficiaries, including Nigerians do not know these. So the students continue to crave opportunities for education, while the opportunities are crying to be taken. They are not limited to the countries mentioned above. Indeed, many more are available in other parts of the world.
A management consulting company, Phillips Consulting is however providing the vital link between the providers of these scholarships/grants and those who need them, by introducing the Afroscholar website.
Scheduled to be launched on June 2 in Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt, the site offers visitors or potential university students can surf and based on some key words, get data about the various universities that are offering these scholarships for the subject that they are interested in.
On why Phillips Consulting is going into the venture, Managing Director, Mr. Foluso Phillips explained that his company has “a very strong vision about Africa. We are a very Africa focused firm and surely by the grace of God before the end of this year, we would have opened up our offices in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. Because this focus has been there for a long time, we tend to understand the problems of Africa and therefore we identified this one about the need for people to go out and study.
“We have a lot of Africans out in the Diaspora who want to come home. We also have a lot of Africans who wants to leave the continent to get an education and some even to work and there is nothing wrong with that. I believe it is all part of globalisation and the thinking that is required for all Africans to understand what is going on in the outside world because the world has advanced a lot further than Africa itself has done,” he said.
The consulting firm realised that a lot of Nigerians and Africans would love to be educated abroad. As Phillips put it, “It is only the children of the rich and affluent that can afford to train their children abroad especially to university level. It is a very expensive exercise. Yet we discovered just by sheer coincidence that many institutions globally offer scholarships specifically to Africans but the problem is that Africans don’t know about this and therefore a lot of these scholarships go unclaimed. So, we sat and asked ourselves how can we help and our people in the Information Systems and e-business Group did some enquiry on the Internet and discovered that quite few universities offer They went further and found 2, 000 institutions offering 8, 000 different types of scholarships. “That is a lot that a lot of people don’t know about and these are universities in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden at the moment. Our people are continuously scanning the Internet and they could have more, Phillips said, adding, “We are hoping to get Canada, Austria, Australia and Switzerland on Board. These universities offer scholarships to African students and the scholarships cover both arts, engineering and science courses”, both at undergraduate and graduate levels.
These scholarships range from full scholarships whereby everything is paid for, throughout the duration of the course, or grants to supplement the cost of study.
On the expected impact of the service on the economy, Phillips said, “We are creating an opportunity for people to go and study abroad. Nigeria whether we like it or not is a global economy. The minute you start selling oil like Nigeria does, you are playing on the global terrain. The kind of technology that we need to build our economy can only be enhanced when we embrace global technology.”
He gave the example of the telecommunication industry, saying the service provided in the country is the same all over the world. “Yet we cannot continue to expect expatriates to come and run the industry for us when we have a lot of able Nigerians who have studied technology abroad. We will be able to bring a lot of them in, to work in these telecommunication companies. In the next 10 years from now, it is not unlikely that a lot of the expatriates will be gone and the companies will be fully staffed by Nigerians.
“But you and I do know that our universities don’t offer training in some of these sophisticated technologies. So it is so important that our people get access to global and international type of education in order for them to help to move the continent forward. Otherwise you find out that we will continue to have to rely on foreigners or continue with the old technology. So this thing is so important for a lot of people who are bright, who are intelligent, who, unfortunately don’t have access to Nigerian scholarships but can have access to international scholarship.”
The Managing Director said, “Unfortunately it is not free.” Although the company has played around with some figures, he assured that whatever will be charged will not be exorbitant. The charge is to cover our administrative cost and to make people to value the service we offer them”, he said, adding, “We have put in a lot of effort into the exercise. At a point we had about 15 people working assiduously to trace these universities and the scholarships they offer. Information about the universities and the scholarship are not posted in any website. You go in and begin to dig for it. So for many months we had people working full time, scanning the net and when we got the data there was this other challenge of packaging it in a way that allows people to surf it and get what they want without much stress.”
More information will be made available as time goes on, but the service is going to be time bound, where a potential visitor pays for air time either through the use of a scratch card or other means, and goes into a cyber café to surf. The company hopes to go into partnership with owners of cybercafés and other interested individuals to make the service available to as many people as require it.

 

Source: http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=48319