Tertiary Education Fund (TETFUND) in conjunction with the Federal Polytechnic, Offa (Fedpoly) has organized a workshop on a four-year strategic plan to improve the road map of the institution.

Speaking at the event, the chairman 2021/2024strategic plan committee, who is also the deputy rector of the institution, Dr.

Augustine Adama, said that the workshop on the strategic plan was to ensure the inclusion of inputs from both academic and town communities in the final copy of the plan after the completion of the draft copy.

He said that the institution had implemented its strategic plan for 2017-2020.

In her presentation, titled, situational analysis and targets of the 2021-2024 strategic plan of the institution, Dr Grace Korter, who is the Dean, of Research and Innovation of the school, said that the plan aimed to increase students' population into some academic programmes that are less populated, “when situationally compared with some other programmes being offered by the institution”.

She gave examples of such departments that needed improved students population including Urban and Regional Planning, Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Estate Management and Valuation, Building Technology and Architecture.

“A method to increase the number of students in the Office and Technology Management department should be adopted going by the gross difference in its population size compared to other departments within the school of Communications and Information Technology”.

Dr. Korter said that the strategic plan also targeted changing the gender imbalance between male and female students in the institution, which she said currently affected female students in some programmes.

“The target should be to strategize on getting more female students into the science programmes. This will help to improve the workforce for a better economy and sustainable development”, she said.

On student's performance, the don, who said that students' performance was at its peak between 2017/2018 and 2018/2019, added that the performance nose-dived in 2019/2020.

She, therefore, said that the target of the plan was “to identify causes of the current performance and strive to overcome the obstacles attributed to all factors responsible for poor performance in a bid to minimize waste of resources and maximize opportunities for students and staff.

“In a similar vein, the efforts put in to achieve success by staff and students should be identified and rewarded”.

Dr. Koko, who said that every strategic plan should aim to improve upon mandates of a given institution, lamented inadequate technical manpower in the country, adding that most state governments had been unable to inject adequate funding to polytechnic institutions, undue political influence by state administrators in location and staff appointment and loss of focus on the essence of establishing polytechnic.