BNET Annual General Meeting – Chair’s Report 2021

The last fifteen months have been difficult for BNET, as they have been for all of us.

“I am glad we are able today to meet physically for the first time in two years even if this is low key and, clearly, the problems associated with COVID 19 are far from over, both here in the UK and in Nigeria and around the world.

 Inevitably, the movement restrictions and decrease in commercial and social activity has had a negative impact on BNET and our projects, both ongoing and planned.  Normally, our Nigerian representative, Greg Ojieh, would be here to give a talk on the various projects but it would not have made sense to ask him to cove over to the UK ten days in advance to complete his quarantine.  So, I will give a brief précis now of our activities in the last months.

Our sponsorship of one student per state for the National Teachers’ Institute online teacher training programme has unfortunately fallen into temporary abeyance.  But we plan to re-start it as soon as practicable, wither for those students who completed their first year in 2020 or for those completing their first year in 2021.  We will then sponsor the best student from each State for the next three years and award the N100,000 Gary Clark Prize for the teacher graduating with the highest marks overall.

We still have one year left of our joint sponsorship with the Association of Commonwealth Universities of a Visiting Fellow to Ado Bayero University, Kano, as an external examiner to the Department of Education.  This could not be arranged in 2020, nor indeed in 2021, but we will review the situation next year to see if the programme can be completed and we will assess the options of renewing it.

We continue to sponsor the REEL Foundation, set up by Ajoke Omoware-Adeola, who I hope you will remember gave a talk on her work at the 2019 AGM.  This involved setting up E-learning hubs in the outskirts of Lagos City to encourage children to gain access and experience of the internet and its potential.  This is a school, or a hub, that is run out of hours and during weekends.  We have provided funds to support the volunteers running the centres as well as providing some equipment for them.  More details are available via our website.

We continue to support the Hope For the Village Child Foundation, run by Sister Rita in South Kaduna.  In 2020 we donated £1,000 to help them supply essentials to village children who could not get supplies from towns with the lockdown and, this year, we donated just over £2,000 to help them in their teaching work.

One of the major consequences of the Covid Pandemic has been the closure of schools for several months.  We have supported Gethsemane School in Jos, who take in a considerable number of orphans from the nearby Military Camp as well as the IBRA Foundation School in Miringa, near Biu, in Borno State.  Both have had to close for a large proportion of 2020 and have therefore faced the additional problem of whether to lay off staff or how to pay them.

Earlier this year we agreed to pay three months of staff salaries to the two schools.  Additionally, we are exploring the option of assisting IBRA Foundation to send female staff on computer training courses.

We received a private donation of just over £2,000 earlier this y ear to be spent on a primary school in Badagry, Lagos State, and we are currently arranging to buy various educational aids and equipment to supply them.

Last year we agreed to sponsor an NGO PADEAP (Pan African Education and Advocacy Programme) who are starting a pilot teacher training project in Abuja to assist teaching ad some of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).  The modalities are yet to be finalised as the State Universal Basic Education Board (UBEB) has not cooperated as initially promised but we feel these types of initiatives are important and worth persevering with.  So, I hope to be able to report more positively on this project by next year.

As always, our aim as Trustees is to try to ensure any project we sponsor will benefit as many children as possible and has a good chance of success and will be sustainable.  Our focus, where possible, is on teacher training, as can be seen by the description of the projects above.  With the current difficulties in the educational system in Nigeria exacerbated by the challenges of COVID, there is a constant challenge for us between approving projects that have little chance of success because we feel we must assist where we can and, constantly, rejecting projects that we do not believe will meet our criteria. This remains, for us, one of our major challenges.

In the last year, two Trustees have resigned – Mary Anderson and Hindy El Fadel.  They have been replaced by Edith Ngozi David and Janet Kirk, both of whom are here today.

Like so many other organisations, companies and groups, all our meetings this last 15 months have been by Zoom, with the inevitable lack of bonding and fellowship that we get with live meetings.  Nevertheless I want to thank all our Board Members here and in Nigeria and, especially, our officers as well as Frances Tarr, our Administrator, and Karen Sussex, helping out with our website, who have kept us running and functioning as best we can these last months.

I want to thank all our Members for their continued support, especially those of you who came today.  And let us hope by 2022 we will be back to something closer to what we had before and can organise a proper AGM with reports from Nigeria and Guest Speakers.”

David Brandler, BNET Chair
22/7/2021