From Oladipupo Ibraheem

Sixty-seven new students of Wavecrest School of Hospitality, Surulere, Lagos has taken the oath of matriculation.

The students were admitted for the National and Higher National Diploma programmes in Hospitality Training, Culinary Courses, Home Management, and National Skill Qualifications.

Addressing the new students, Provost of the all-girls Monotechnic Rosana Forsuelo, said the nation’s lopsided education system which produces skills that are not aligned with industry requirement, constitutes unemployment and under employment. Worse still, Forsuelo said it results in brain drain, skill gap and entrepreneurial incompetence.

Forsuelo said the institution operates under Women’s Board International Cooperative Society, a non-governmental organisation which identified a shortfall of skill in hotels and restaurants nationwide; hence took it upon itself to address that lacuna.

She said: “We do trainings on hospitality for hotel owners because we realised that when our students go for their industrial attachment, they are faced with a big problem as some hotels and restaurants don’t have the standards. So we had to design programmes for Nigerian hotel owners to have the basic training on hospitality.

Read Also: UNICAL matriculates 12,240

Further, she described Wavecrest as a specialised Monotechnic approved by the regulatory body, National Board for Tertiary Education, adding that students are offered admission via the Unified Tertiary and Matriculation Examination, (UTME) and are mobilised for the mandatory National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, upon completion of their programmes.

She said many of the students are from less privileged backgrounds, the more reason the NGO takes care of a huge part of their tuition.

“The NGO’s aim is basically to empower and develop women, because there is cultural bias in the country that leads to gender inequality,” she added.

She urged the students to be law-abiding and abide by the dictates of the oath they had taken.

On her part, Registrar of the institution, Veronica Esode, described hospitality as the largest and most dynamic sector of the modern economy providing not only jobs but a myriad of other opportunities.

She said some of their students are already one leg into entrepreneurship even while in school because they have been empowered with life skills and a business sense in several areas of hospitality.”