Shell Welcomes 10 Foreign Scholarship Beneficiaries

The Anglo-Dutch oil gi
ant, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) has expended over $27m on scholarship programmes between 2012 and 2014 towards improvement of educational excellence in Nigeria.
The Managing Director SPDC and Country Chair, Shell Companies in Nigeria, Mr. Osagie Okunbor, who disclosed this recently at a welcome dinner Pparty in honour of the fourth batch of 2013/2014 SPDC Niger Delta Postgraduate Scholarship awards said the oil firm spent the sum of $5.3m on 850 university students and 1,795 secondary students in 2012.
He also said that in 2013, about $7 million was invested by Shell on scholarship in 2013 while in 2014 the sum of $14.8 million was invested on scholarship.
Okunbor said the company is passionate about building capacity in education because education is key in the development of the society.
“The only way the industrial sector can thrive is to inject the best brain in our youths. We need the most capable individuals to build the nation’s economy”, he said.
The Managing Director explained that since the inception of the Niger Delta Postgraduate Foreign Scholarship in 2010 about 50 graduates have so far benefited from the scheme which aims at building talent pipeline of oil and gas-related disciplines.
The company boss explained that transparency was being strictly observed throughout the process of selection of beneficiaries, adding that the programme was managed by three universities in the United Kingdom, Scholarship Consultancy Services based in United Kingdom and the SPDC joint venture Nigeria Content team.
The programme, he said cover all expenses, tuition, living allowances, travel and other associated costs and that each batch covers ten beneficiaries from the region.
The fourth batch of beneficiaries was made up of  eight persons from Delta State and two from Rivers State and the beneficiaries thanked SPDC for the award and said it’s a dream come true.

Chris Oluoh