Following the ideology of Malcolm X, who said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belong to those who prepare for it today”, a community leader kick- started a project at Mgbowo in Enugu State.
Alex Onyia, the chief executive officer of Educare, a leading software firm, celebrating the success of his investment in education took to his official X handle @winexviv, where he disclosed that the project which started in 2023 was to curb mass failure in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) conducted by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) among youngsters in his community.
“Last JAMB was a disaster for my village youngsters. Over 70 percent of them failed UTME, and the rest sparely passed. Rather than waiting for the government, we decided to take a different approach.
“We took the challenge upon ourselves for it not to repeat itself again. Every youngster in my village right now is on an intensive morning and evening drilling for next year’s JAMB, and they undertake Computer-Based Test (CBT) once monthly with large pool of 16 years past questions across different subjects,” he said.
To achieve the expected goal, he explained that in the CBT classes, they tracked the students’ performances on different topics and laid more emphasis on their weaknesses across different subject topics.
One common thing noticed, according to Onyia is that many of the youngsters were alien to computers and could not even use a mouse not to talk of keyboards.
This very noticeable weakness made him wonder how these students were going to succeed in JAMB when they were probably using a computer for the first time on a UTME day.
Hence, they resolved to invest in the education of the young ones in his community by paying for their JAMB registration fees, and also offering full scholarship to everyone that scores 300 and above.
“The biggest challenge was that most of the students do not know how to use computer. It’s an eye opener and our mission is for all of them to score above 250,” he said.
One year after, Onyia announced that the investment has truly paid off. “I am immensely grateful. Praising Jesus Christ for the remarkable outcomes, I’m thrilled to report that from the results collated so far none of the students scored below 200 in their JAMB,” he announced.
“Many achieved scores over 250, with a few surpassing 300. It’s particularly heartening to see my younger cousin, who previously scored 187 in last year’s JAMB, elevate to a score of 243 this time around,” Onyia added.
The tech expert revealed that moving forward, he and his team plan to harness the success by having these students mentor the upcoming batch, by getting them to pass on their knowledge and strategies to the new group of learners.
An X user with official handle, @n6oflife6 applauded the spirited efforts of Onyia and his team to get youth at Mgbowo in Awgu Local Government of Enugu State navigate their ways out of illiteracy and poverty through education.
“Education remains the surest path out of poverty. I love what you guys are doing in the South East. God bless you all,” he said.
