Industrial Training Fund (ITF) has urged institutions of higher learning benefiting from Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) to do more to attract better funding for the scheme through profitable collaborations.
At a zonal meeting of the ITF and SIWES directors and coordinators in Delta State, hosted by Federal University of Petroleum Resources (FUPRE), Effurun, stakeholders X-rayed challenges and ways for better administration of SIWES in the state.
The Area Manager, ITF, Ugo Chinyere Onyeka, expressed worry over the alleged lukewarm attitude of some institutions towards effective administration of the SIWES in their various institutions, saying such development could affect their core mandate of developing human resources and the industrial base of the country.
Onyeka, while urging the institutions to be more pragmatic to ensure that SIWES runs smoothly, urged stakeholders to liaise with heads of their institutions to put better facilities in place for the programme.
She disclosed that the ITF does not have many challenges when it comes to payment of supervisory and student allowances, saying that all verified institutions for 2022 had been fully paid for SIWES.
The ITF Delta area manager tasked stakeholders to come up with more areas of collaboration and consultancy to deepen the fund base of the scheme.
Onyeka said: “We are in FUPRE to discuss challenges we are experiencing and to proffer resolutions . The best part of the meeting is that FUPRE has offered us so many other areas of collaboration both for the SIWES directors and for the ITF which we intend to key in, even with some international inclinations and other areas we want to tap in.”
