One of the winners of the British Academy Global Award for 2024, Olutayo Adesina, said on Thursday that the standard of education in Nigeria has remained formidable despite all the challenges.

Mr Adesina, a professor of History at the University of Ibadan, disclosed this in an interview in Ibadan.

According to him, the nation’s education standard still towers above that of other countries in the world despite the challenges within the sector.

He said winning the award negated all wrong insinuations that Nigerian education was in shambles.

“I don’t think that is true. We still have the knowledge. We have integrity and passion despite everything happening in the system,” Mr Adesina said.

He said the British Academy Global Award started in 2018 for professors across the world to compete for grants to execute their respective projects.

He said the grants could be highly competitive and extremely difficult to get.

According to him, an interested party is expected to apply online and look for a host university in the United Kingdom.

Mr Adesina said the applicant would be expected to approach the host university to strengthen their application before passing it through the university department and faculty.

The professor said the application would be sent to the British Academy Global Award, which judges applications worldwide.

“Thereafter, the academy will send all applications to its assessors for assessment to select the best. For the year 2024, only eight applications were selected from the mass of applications submitted and two were from Nigeria,” Mr Adesina explained.

Speaking on his research, Mr Adesina said it would examine the interface between the town and gown, the town being the city of Ibadan and the gown being UI.

“My specific topic is ‘The Town and Gown Interface: Ibadan and Decolonisation of Social Knowledge in the 20th Century’. So, for the first time, we are looking at the position of the town in the relationship of the university to the decolonisation of knowledge,” Mr Adesina said.

He said he would undertake the research at the University of Manchester for four years with a £ 879,117 grant.

The second Nigerian winner is Abubakar Sule Sani, whose research theme is ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back: Past and Present West African Communities Revealed through Museum Collections’.

He was awarded £892,037.31 with the University of East Anglia as the host university.

(NAN)