Nigeria’s Bowen University honors AfDB’s President Akinwumi Adesina with Honoris Causa

The African Development Bank’s President, Akinwumi Adesina has recently been awarded an Honoris Causa from Bowen University in Nigeria. The award, which was presented at the 14^th graduation ceremony of the University held on November 2, 2019, was in recognition of Adesina’s ‘immense contribution to promoting entrepreneurship on the African continent’.

The African youth have highly been benefited from Akinwumi Adesina’s passion for innovation in agriculture including other market drivers. “Youth are not the future; they are the present. Our collective responsibility is to prepare them to thrive today to drive the future through entrepreneurship,” he cited.

The former Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development urged universities to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurship to thrive. He offered several recommendations to universities to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit in youth. These include standardising and enforcing entrepreneurship requirements, introduction of technology business incubator and innovation hubs, fostering access to venture capital and angel investors, and the establishment of private-sector driven research, technology and innovation centers on university campuses.

The 59-year-old Head of the African Development Bank concluded his address with a plea to Nigeria to believe in its youth and to devote 2 percent of its oil earnings toward the setting up of a National Science and Innovation Fund to drive tech-enabled growth in Nigeria. He also matched the university’s gift prizes of 500,000, 300,000 and 200,000 naira to top three graduating students of 2019, all female.