The Vice Chancellor of Chrisland University, Prof. Chinedum Peace Babalola has affirmed that the university encourages innovation among her students.

She made this known in an exclusive interview with CEOAfrica at the inauguration of African Progress Group, APG in Abeokuta recently.

Speaking on how the institution intends to channel academic prowess to innovative solutions, Prof. Babalola stated that the institution already has its strategic plans.

She said, “When I took over as Vice Chancellor of the institution one of our strategic plans is what we call ‘Innovate Chrisland’, we want to reward people that come up with innovative research and development. So people who come up with such will be rewarded and encouraged to develop the tool – the technological tool that was developed during the 9th Annual Information Technology Development Program to solve a problem which had to do with agriculture will be developed further and test run live so that we can see how to solve a problem.

“We could just take a small community and test run it, because there is what we call community engagement, we would like to engage the community of farmers with whatever tool has been developed during that program and that will spur other departments or units. Recently, I was speaking to people in Criminology and Security Studies that they can actually volunteer and assist the university security to tackle the issue of security in the university, I informed them that we can actually start something like Karate and teach youths, our girls how they can defend themselves if they are faced with rape or danger, so we encourage innovation.”

On the possible lessons the students can learn from attending a conference like the inauguration of the APG and listening to accomplished world leaders, she said, “The students were chosen selectively about 20 of them out of which two were to speak at the conference unfortunately they were not given the opportunity to speak but we have been told that their speeches will be published which is good but at least they were able to listen to great leaders like former President Olusegun Obasanjo, former Italian President, Romano Prodi, Kojo Annan – son of late Kofi Annan gave a fantastic speech and so did the African Student Union leaders. So, the students were able to listen to a lot of accomplished leaders. That alone can make a lot of impression, they saw, they listened and a lot of the speeches focused on the youths – developing the youths, they are no longer the leaders of tomorrow they are already the leaders of today so they should be able to take the bull by the horn and run with it, I believe it will bring transformation to their lives.

“As Vice Chancellor, we have this weekly assembly to ensure that whatever we learn today, we are able to step it down to the assembly of staff and students that are not able to attend so that they will carry the issue of African progress in their minds in everything they are doing. They important thing is as an African what can you do to solve the problems that you face, how can they use the courses they are doing to solve the problems that we face in Africa.”