180 Get Shell Scholarship

As a veritable means of giving underprivileged students the opportunity to sound education while adding a new fillip to human capital development, about 180 indigent students from hard-to-reach communities in three Niger Delta states have been granted full scholarships to study in three of the best secondary schools in Nigeria.

The schools are Brookstone Secondary School, Airport Road, Jephthah Comprehensive Secondary School, East-West Road, and Archdeacon Brown Education Centre, Woji, all in Rivers State.

Making the announcement while inaugurating the 2012 edition of the Cradle-To-Career initiative in Port Harcourt, recently, Managing Director, Shell Petroleum Development Company, Mr Mutiu Sunmonu, said 60 students from the three states of Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers were chosen as pilot case because of the importance of the three key states in SPDC operations in the region.

Sunmonu said the annual scholarship scheme was designed to provide quality secondary education to brilliant students from rural communities, bridge educational inequalities, and enhance high literacy in SPDC’s operational areas in the Niger Delta.

The managing director, who is also the country chair of Shell Companies in Nigeria, noted that the scheme was designed to help develop a sound human resource base for future employment, adding that Cradle-To-Career would ultimately contribute significantly to attaining the United Nations Millennium Development Goal on education in the region.

He expressed the company’s excitement at the good performance of the students, who have participated in the scheme since 2010, saying that their brilliant exploits have shown that those in the rural communities also hold great potential for this nation.

Sunmonu said that SPDC joint venture partners and governments in the region were collaborating to provide scholarship opportunities for thousands of youths in the region and across Nigeria locally and globally, while also encouraging intellectual and academic competition amongst students through different programmes.

While commending the governments of Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers states for sustaining the partnership in improving educational opportunities for the youths, the SPDC managing director appealed to other multinational oil and gas companies to emulate the Cradle-To-Career initiative so as to join in the fight to move the region’s development agenda forward.