Newly-elected APWEN Lagos chapter chairman, Mrs Atinuke Owolabi, made the call during the association’s public lecture and Annual General Meeting in Ikeja.

Owolabi assured that female engineers spread across the various arms of the profession could fix the refineries within a year.

“All women engineers are ready to come together and see how we can proffer solutions, making sure that we revamp these refineries.

“So, we call on our president to challenge female engineers to revamp and rehabilitate these refineries, and I want to assure you that, within a year, just challenge us, we will make sure that the refineries would be put to operation by the grace of God,” she said.

She said any nation aspiring for development must empower its indigenous engineers and manpower.

“It is imperative that our homegrown engineers are empowered and granted the right opportunity to showcase our competence,” she said.

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She said women had inbuilt natural qualities of being good managers and being excellent, adding that their talents should also be explored in building roads and other critical infrastructure.

Owolabi said Nigeria should reduce reliance on foreign experts and give opportunity to local engineers who are equally or more competent than their imported counterparts.

“I want to also implore our leaders, especially our president and governors, to empower indigenous engineers because we are very good.

“A country without engineers cannot develop,” she said.

Owolabi, a Fellow of the Nigerian Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, promised that her administration would focus on mentorship and skill development for young engineers.

She also pledged collaboration with other NGOs while reeling out planned development programmes for three Lagos communities.

“Together, we shall shatter barriers and triumph over challenges in reaffirmation of the fact that gender should never constrain one’s potential in any domain,” she said.

The guest speaker, Mrs Olayinka Abdul, speaking on the theme, “The Role of Female Engineers in Building Sustainable Infrastructure”, said rising fuel prices required urgent measures for green alternatives.

Abdul, a former APWEN president, said green buildings reduce wastes, conserve energy and ensure huge energy savings and enormous long-term benefits.

She said Lagos was investing heavily in renewable energy while listing completed and ongoing interventions in various sectors, including health, education, housing and transportation.

Abdul said the various options available were wasting because some Nigerians had a class mentality not allowing them embrace local researches.

She cited examples of viable technologies, developed by “our forefathers”, being ignored because people want to move with trending foreign technologies.

Abdul advised APWEN to adopt communities and train them on how to generate power from their wastes.

She also enumerated measures female engineers could adopt against work place discrimination and how to receive mentorship from male counterparts without bruising their ego.

Panelists at the event proffered solutions to the multifaceted problem of inadequate water supply in Lagos State.

They enumerated ways mentorship and advocacy could grow capacity of female engineers.

Source: NAN

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The governor gave the advice when he received members of the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria, APWEN, led by the National President, Mrs Felicia Agubata, in Asaba on Tuesday.

He said that the girl-child should be motivated to study competitive courses, especially the sciences, explaining that with science-based courses, more job opportunities would be created in the country.

The governor, who was presented with an award by APWEN for being an “Inspirational Leader in Job Creation, Education, and Infrastructure Development,” said “your advocacy for the girl-child is encouraging.

“There is the need to ensure that more girl-children embrace the sciences and the competitive side of study.

“The more science-based courses we embrace, the more entrepreneurial skills that we can grow to check unemployment because unemployment makes it difficult to check insecurity.”

He emphasized that at primary and secondary school levels children should be given good education to lay a solid foundation for their future endeavours, adding that the government had given attention to the recruitment of teachers.

“In Delta, we recently carried out employment of teachers with 90 per cent of them in the sciences, because we are emphasising merit in the employment to ensure that we lay solid foundation for our children at primary and secondary levels.

“We are also doing a lot in technical education, because we believe that people can acquire skills in a secondary school system that is technologically-based.

“We have revamped six technical colleges and we promised to construct 19 more before the end of my tenure,” Okowa said.

He commended APWEN for choosing Asaba for its meeting and urged the members for their commitment to create awareness for the girl-child in science education.

Earlier, Agbubata told the governor that they were in Delta for their meeting, disclosing that they were spurred to present the award to him based on the giant strides recorded by his administration in road construction, airport, education, job creation and others.

She commended the wife of the Deputy Governor, Mrs Ebieri Otuaro, an engineer, for her commitment to the growth to engineering profession.

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