Multichoice lifts Katsina with resource centres

Leading pay TV operator in the country, Multichoice Nigeria, has lifted Katsina State with 10 educational resource centres, bringing to 81 its total number of such centres nationwide.

Managing Director, MultiChoice Nigeria, Mr. Joseph Hundah, said the centres are technological resource facilities by which it helps to enhance learning and development in secondary schools across the country.

“As part of the Multichoice Resource Centre project, Multichoice makes available to secondary schools, physical hardware including television sets, decoders and satellite dishes, learning boards, laboratory tables and chairs, generators, video recorders as well as a bouquet of learning and educational channels,” he said.

He also said that these educational and learning channels are customized to this special project and are not available commercially.

The objective, Hundah said, “is to assist schools in making the process of learning more vivid and empirical and therefore more impactful.”

Students in schools where scientific laboratories do not exist for instance, he said, could witness scientific experiments being carried out and in the process get valuable insights they could never have gotten if all they had to do was to imagine how these processes take place.

“Feedback from the dozens of schools across Nigeria where the Multichoice Resource Centre project has been implemented has been overwhelmingly positive as teachers as well as students have expressed immense satisfaction with the additional value that the resource centres add to their quest to teach or learn, respectively,” he said.

He listed some of the benefiting states on the project to include Lagos, Enugu, Kaduna, Kano, Cross River, Abia, Ekiti, Bauchi, Katsina and Abuja, respectively, in four different phases, even as the fifth phase is expected to commence shortly.

The Katsina State Commissioner for Education, Dr. Ismail Tsigi commended Multichoice for the Resource Centre Initiative, describing it as a laudable private sector initiative that will contribute to significantly enhance Nigeria’s educational development.

He said that the Katsina State Ministry of Education will spearhead a crusade to help ensure that the facilities at the centres are used judiciously by school principals, teachers and students through close monitoring to ensure that the state derives optimal benefit from the facilities.

The Multichoice Resource Centre Project, according to Ade Adefeko, the company’s head of corporate communications and public affairs is a corporate social investment initiative by Multichoice.

“We realize that knowledge is pivotal to Nigeria’s social and economic development and indeed key to Nigeria retaining a competitive edge in today’s world which is driven by intellectual capital. This is the reason that we will continue to commit resources into ensuring that as much as we can, we help to empower thousands of young people with the knowledge and skill with which to be relevant and make a real difference in the future,” Ade said.

Multichoice, he noted, works in partnership with the NGO, SchoolNet Nigeria and various state Ministries of Education in implementing the Multichoice Resource Centre Project.


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