The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has conducted the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) for foreign candidates desirous of securing admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions. A report has stated.

The examination was held in cities of Abidjan in Cote d ‘Ivoire, Accra in Ghana, and Buea in Cameroon.

It was learnt however that the examination could not hold in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Cotonou, Benin Republic; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Johannesburg, South Africa; London, United Kingdom, and Nairobi, Kenya, due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

Conducting examinations in foreign centres is part of the Board’s conscious strategies to market the nation’s tertiary institutions to Nigerians in the Diaspora as well as international candidates.

The board, is at the moment, exploring the possibility of having more centres with Europe and America being major targets.It was learnt.

Education stakeholders lamented that the ranking of Nigeria’s tertiary institutions would continue to be abysmally low until the country improves on several vital performance indicators.

Attracting international students would assist in making the country’s tertiary institutions, especially in making the universities truly universal and qualified to compete with their peers across the globe.

It would be recalled that the board had, in its quest to finding a seamless process that would attract foreign candidates into Nigerian tertiary institutions, constituted an Internationalisation Committee headed by Prof. Attahiru Jega.

The committee comprising very distinguished scholars, most of whom are former Vice-Chancellors, representatives of the National Universities Commission (NUC), National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) and National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) as members.

It was reliably gathered that the report of the Committee was submitted to the Hon. Minister of Education, Mal. Adamu Adamu, who saw the critical role it would play in terms of opening our institutions to the world, had reconstituted the yet-to-be inaugurated National Committee on Internationalisation also to be headed by Prof. Attahiru Jega.

Recall that the Times Higher Education (THE) 2021 Impact Rankings ranked only two universities in Nigeria, the University of Ibadan (UI) and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) with a percent score in international student ranking. (With agency report)