As part of efforts to harness the strong entrepreneurial culture amongst University of Lagos students by providing business incubation, growth and accelerator support required to fully explore their latent creativity and innovative potentials, the Executive Director of FATE Foundation, Mrs. Adenike Adeyemi paid a courtesy visit to the University of Lagos on a partnership discussion on Friday 3rd of December, 2021.
Mrs. Adeyemi was received by the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Ayodele Atsenuwa on behalf of the Vice Chancellor, Professor Oluwatoyin T. Ogundipe, FAS in his office at the Senate House.
She remarked that her foundation interest was also to understand the design of the university’s scholarship programmes, how it is performing and how it can support it to upscale the interest of the students to learning.
She revealed the foundation as Nigeria’s foremost business incubator and accelerator outfit with several programs aimed at supporting and enabling aspiring and emerging Nigerian entrepreneurs to start, grow and scale-up their businesses. A proof of this was seen recently, when it organised a programme that had about 743 entrepreneurs across 24 states as part of its model to impacting meaningfully.
Mrs. Adeyemi also posited that the foundation sustainability model is driven by funding and technical support from local and international partners and enabled by a strong volunteerism strategy.
In its philanthropy efforts, she mentioned that last year the foundation in its bid to strengthen public health infrastructure, committed about a million dollar sum to key into governmental efforts to properly equip and support public health facilities and front-line personnel against the strains and pressures from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In her response, the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Development Services) Prof. Atsenuwa expressed satisfaction with what the foundation has been able to achieve and commended them for their good works.
She said that the university has a spectrum of scholarships to support students under the Office of Advancement. There are three different ways she revealed scholarship support could be granted – the merit based students, the needs based students or both.
She spoke about support the university has enjoyed from alumni, donors, friends and other stakeholders to partner it in promoting higher standards of teaching, learning, research and community service, thus leaving a lasting legacy for future generations; and encouraged the foundation to tap into this. Other discussions that followed that cut across several ways to help indigent students, disadvantaged students with disabilities, especially with the adopt-a-student program model designed by the university. The merit based scholarship support was also discussed in details.
FATE Foundation was founded by Mr. Fola Adeola, Founder & Pioneer Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB), with the support of other leading private sector leaders committed to fostering sustainable entrepreneurship.
