Veterinary association partners stakeholders to surmount professional challenges

Veterinary association partners stakeholders to surmount professional challenges

Collaboration
By Felicia Imohimi
Abuja, March 13, 2020 (NAN) The Nigerian Veterinary Medical Association (NVMA) says it is collaborating with the Veterinary Council of Nigeria (VCN), National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), National University Commission (NUC) among others to surmount challenges in the profession.
Prof. Bello Agaie, President of the association said this at the Annual Leaders’ summit of the association on Friday in Abuja with the theme: “The future of veterinary education in Nigeria”.
Agaie noted that the profession was bedeviled by lot of challenges ranging from dearth of faculties of veterinary medicine and colleges thereby impeding the progress of veterinarians in the global economy, locally and otherwise.
He identified other challenges to include poor institutional framework, inadequate or dearth of quality professionals at the colleges of veterinary medicine, poor capacity building of the professionals among others.
“The summit which seeks to collaborate with stakeholders in veterinary profession is necessitated because we are having issues with number of veterinary institutes that are springing up.
“We are having challenges in the number of teachers who should teach and we are also having challenges in the market place because most of the veterinarians do not have direct market.
“They might be employed but not properly employed, it is worthy of concern to us as professionals and stakeholders.
“It is our prayers that with the new VCN, which is our regulatory body, NUC among other stakeholders in animal health and colleges, they can give us a better framework on what veterinary education should be in this country.
“Such measures will lead to a new revolution in veterinary training at least for the next one decade and after 10 years we can have another opportunity to review where we are and what we need to do,” he noted.
Speaking on the summit theme he explained that there was need to move away from certificated training to competency so that in the next decade when the practitioners go out they would be able to cope with global markets.
According to him, it is very important for us to discuss this matter because we are going to be producing veterinary practitioners that are coming into the market.
“If we do not review from time to time the type of things that are required in the industry we won’t be able to do the changes that we need.
“Part of our work is to have annual summit bringing the people in government, private sector, the academia and regulators together to discuss issues that affect the profession and deal with them.
“By addressing those issues we can move forward in the interest of the profession and the country itself.
“At the end of the summit we should be able to come up with what veterinary education should be in the next 10 years to 20 years,” he said. (NAN)
FUA/AMM/DCU
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Edited by Abiemwense Moru/Donald Ugwu