Technical and Entrepreneurship Centre (TEC)

Historical Background

The first decade of the 21st century has ushered into Nigeria, in particular, and the world in general, dwindling job opportunities. This has not come as a surprise to Nigerians given the massive yearly turnout of graduates against zero job creation. The situation is being compounded by the threatening global economic recession that is sure to impact negatively on the Nigerian economy which is already in the throes of death.  The need to redress this unwholesome situation of massive youth unemployment is therefore very urgent in Nigeria. The reality of our time has, however, made it very clear that we cannot redress this situation by the old and obsolete approach of appealing to governments to create public service jobs. The only reasonable appeal is that governments should create the enabling environment where innovative ideas can be put to productive use.

Faced with this daunting challenge of youth unemployment government and private sector players are championing the drive for entrepreneurship awareness in the country. It is now a policy of the National Universities Commission (NUC) to encourage Nigerian universities to provide entrepreneurship education for undergraduates so that they can be self-employable after graduation. NUC has taken a step further in trying to address the challenge of graduate unemployment by designing an entrepreneurship course titled Graduate Self Employment (GSE301) that has both the theory and practical components to be taught in Nigerian universities. This course provides a template, but not a straight jacket, for universities to develop their entrepreneurship training programmes.

Long before it became an NUC policy, university of Ilorin had been considering the idea of entrepreneurship training. The senate of the university, through her academic planning unit had been brainstorming on how to equip our students with the relevant entrepreneurship knowledge and skills that would help them to be job creators and not job seekers. As far back as year 2005, the university had agreed, in principle, to create a directorate to handle entrepreneurship training in the university. This decision was put into effect in June this year (2008) with the establishment of the Technical and Entrepreneurship Centre (TEC) under a director. TEC was approved by the university senate to administer entrepreneurship training, Community Based Experience and Services (COBES), and Work Study, each with a clear mandate.  The Senate instrument for the establishment of TEC was developed by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor K.L. Ayorinde.

TEC started operating at the beginning of the 2008/2009 session following the three unit mandate given to it by senate of the University.