By Favour Nnabugwu
With the end of primary and secondary students’ holiday drawing near, Ekiti in Diaspora has committed N48million to sponsor 15, 000 Ekiti students as they resume schools this September.

Ekiti in Diaspora means all Ekiti indigenes either born in Ekiti or elsewhere with roots in Ekiti but living outside of the country.

The back to school project of the Ekiti in Diaspora will provide a pair of customized sandal for each of the 15,000 students from primary 1 to primary 6 whilst the state indigenes scattered across the world intend to unfold more plans for Ekiti students in secondary and tertiary institutions President of Ekiti in Diaspora, Mr. Julius Akinyemi in a mail to Saturday Vanguard said the group’s goal is to provide customised school sandals to all students in Ekiti-State public school from Primary one through primary six for 15,000 students.

Established in May 2008 with a mission to help empower the Ekiti people to invent new opportunities for themselves and their societies both socially and economically, Akinyemi explained that the objective of Ekiti in Diaspora based in USA with membership spanning across the globe, is to help in the improvement of the socio-economic conditions of all Ekiti citizens.

He said, “We have members across the globe, but our active members reside in UK and US. We also have members in Nigeria and other part of Africa that help with the home front activities. Our members have diverse background and skill sets. We all work together as a team and get things done. I hope we can replicate such spirit here in Nigeria. “Our existence transcends politics.

One of our main goals is to help promote entrepreneurial development to get people off the dependencies on the government.

We need to find ways to create jobs that will help people to be self-sufficient that the government can benefit from and not the vise versa of the current state where everyone depends on government contracts.” He said the aim of the “Ekiti in Diaspora is to leverage our capabilities and collaboratively work with Ekiti people at home as well as current and future administrations to create a better future for Ekiti people.

Akinyemi highlighted the need for Ekiti people to be information techonology ready for the new Nigeria in line with President Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation agenda. “We need to start leveraging technology as tools to drive our social-economic development.

The era of file based government and unstructured service delivery approach should be over; we need to tap into the world of technology.”

He emphasised, “Forward-thinking leaders are figuring out how to make their society, cities and environ a better place to live. Part of that is through the technology they’re adopting. But it’s also through the coalitions they’re building, the internal cultures they’re changing and the operational hurdles they’re overcoming.”