‘We need to build bridge between female engineering graduates and multinationals’

Funmilola Ojelade is the newly installed president of the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN). Speaking in an interview with NGOZI OKPALAKUNNE recently in Lagos, Ojelade who is the 16th president of the association, a chemical engineer as well as the manager pre-press, currency production, Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Company, decried dearth of skilled female engineers in Nigeria. She affirmed that her two-year tenure just like her predecessor will centre on encouraging girls in secondary schools across the country to study Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) so as to enable them study engineering in the university. Excerpts:

Engineering is seen by most people as a male-dominated area, What actually motivated you to study the course?

I do not really believe that engineering is a male dominated area. It was right from secondary school that l decided l was going to study engineering because my best subject then was mathematics. So, it was my good performance in mathematics that actually motivated me to study engineering. Besides mathematics, l was also good in physics and chemistry. Though, it got to a point when it was very difficult for me to understand one of the science subjects and that was in form one and two, but after a while, I picked up. Besides, it was a natural thing for me to go into engineering because my elder brother studied civil engineering and when it was time for me to fill JAMB form, it was very easy for me to do that.

As a female engineer, have you ever faced any discrimination from your male counterpart?

One of the things my brother said when I opted to study chemical engineering was that there are more girls in that field. There were 8 girls in my class of 40, and that was a lot because in some classes, there were no girls. But, since I graduated, I have never had reasons to think that I was being treated in a particular way because I am woman. If there was any assignment to do, we don’t have to climb rooftops. I have never had an experience of being discriminated against.

How do you intend to complement the efforts of your predecessor in terms of STEM for girls’ initiative and transforming the association?

APWEN is an educational and service organisation. Presently, under the leadership of the past president, Dr. Felicia Agubata, APWEN has taken a giant leap and we have quite a number of programmes on ground which we use to increase the numerical strength of female engineers and also be a catalyst for the progress of the woman engineers. So many of our programmes are tailored in that direction. We have a programme for primary school girls which kicked-off two years ago. We have the ‘Invent it, Build it’ programme, the way it has been done is that it is now creating a revolution of girls that will take engineering as a career. We also have the ‘Mayen Adetiba Technical Boot Camp for Girls’, and also the ‘Introduce a girl child to engineering’ which is for girls in secondary school designed to inspire girls to study engineering in the university. These ones have already been laid down and I will continue with the projects. What we now need to add is for those in the university.

The question is, when you graduate from the university, what do you do? How do you fit into the industry you are going in to? A few people have actually asked me what they need to do after they graduated as engineers. So, we are now focusing more on graduating students and young engineers. We are going to introduce the town and gown mentoring programme which will bring multinationals to meet with the graduating students and young engineers. Essentially, we want them to know what is required in that industry so that they can focus their learning towards that.

One of the things we have communicated with a few multinationals is to increase the percentage of female engineers. One of the multinationals said they already have 15 per cent of female engineers and that they want to increase it to 30 per cent, because they said there is a dearth of female engineers. I am aware that there are so many female engineers who don’t even have a job. So, obviously, something is missing. It may be that they don’t have the required skill that the multinationals needed because when they call for employment, they will get thousands of applications and they don’t pick them.

So, we need to build a bridge between the graduates and the multinationals. If you can get the required skills to work with the multinationals, then you can work with a local company. So, we are raising the bar so that even local companies can have good quality engineers to employ. We intend to build the capacity of our young engineers, such that while they are still in school, they can have it at the back of their mind the type of skills they needed to develop and the things to focus on even in their academics so that they can become employable. Essentially, that is what we are doing. We are creating an opening for them so that by the time they are finishing from the university, they will have a place to go. On the ‘Invent it, Build it’, programme, we have already awarded the students scholarships, so every year, we are going to require the chapters who we have mandated to organise “Boot camps” every year and ensure that girls who won the scholarships will be part of the “boot camps”. The essence is to continue to help the girls focus on the fact that they will one day become female engineers. The “boot camp involves” them doing experiments that have engineering concept and showing them the value of engineering in the technological development of the society.

You talked about dearth of female engineers in the country, what factors hinder women from studying engineering in the university?

As a woman, the primary thing is the mindset of the society that engineering is a career for the men. We even have parents that will say the career is a male thing; therefore, you should not go in to it. A lot of people also think that it requires physical effort like those of motor mechanics and bricklayers. We know that the engineer is the designer of the structure, methods and process that will be used primarily. We have craftsmen and technicians who are going to carry out the physical aspect.

Mathematics is one of the core subjects required to study engineering, why do people see it as a problem?

I don’t see the subject as a problem, I say that because both men and women may not be good in mathematics and we have seen what the problem is. From my own personal experience, the teaching method goes a long way. My mathematics performance was bad in form one and two. The reason was that the teacher who was taking the subject was an expatriate from the Philippines and I didn’t understand what she was saying. She had the Philippines accent and I didn’t understand her teaching in mathematics. I grew up in Ibadan where the kind of English I understood was the one with Yoruba accent, but when they brought us a Yoruba teacher who taught us mathematics in form three, I found it very easy with the way she approached it. She was a good teacher and her efforts reinforced what she had taught us.

What challenges did you encounter in your field as a chemical engineer?

My work has always been paid employment with government establishments. They have structure and process that have been put in place that I don’t have to be the one to think of how to do it. The only time we could have an issue is when problems arise and you have to sit down with a team and decide on how to solve it. That happens a lot and it is part of what you do to get your experience. Basically, there has not been any challenge that we have not been able to overcome.

How do you intend to empower your members technologically?

We have the business and social entrepreneurship committee in APWEN. They came up with the training and capacity building for members. Being engineers, we are in the technology field already, but there are quite a number of things that we may not know about. For instance, things like financing because some of us are business people; there are things on entrepreneurship that some of us are not doing well. So, these are the kind of additional capacity building that the committee brought to the table. The committee also has plans for the university students which is the innovation challenge that we just concluded. The title was ‘Waste management for social good’, organised last year. This year, we are going to be working on water and sanitation. Because we are technology inclined, it is those things that we know we lack that we are going to focus on to empower ourselves.

In what ways do you think government can assist engineers to solve problems of research?

It is not everybody in government that understands the problem of engineering, so what we do basically is advocacy to advise the government on issues on research. Some of the things that happen in research institutes are that they are not tied to solving specific problem in an industry. In abroad, the industry will go to the universities and inform them about the need to do research on certain things, and the companies will fund the research. One of the things I see happening about research in Nigeria is that they give you a topic and you write your papers and keep it. But it’s important we go to the industries and look at the challenges confronting them. That is one way engineers can add value so that we can target the research for solving a specific problem. So, if you are solving a specific problem, everybody will buy it, but if you are solving a problem that had been solved somewhere, you may not have too much buyers.

Where do you see APWEN in the next five years?

I believe we are going to continue with the way we have been going. I see APWEN being like a multinational where we will go beyond Nigeria. We are going to have people from all over the world trying to become members because of the value we are adding to women.