• Anayo Ezugwu

THE Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, has received 96 submissions for research proposals entry from the academia in the country. The commission said at the close of entry on July 31, the submissions were 40 more than the 56 that was recorded in 2016.

Umar Danbatta, executive vice chairman and chief executive, NCC, during the inauguration of the inter-agency committee for the evaluation of 2017 research proposals from the academia, on Wednesday, September 13, expressed his satisfaction at the diversity of the research topics from core telecommunications issues to oil pipeline protection and herdsmen tracking. He said telecommunications is a super infrastructure industry that addresses the concerns of other industries or put differently that facilitates growth and development of other industries.

“Our goal is to be able to use this intervention to address industry problems as well as some other societal issues that need urgent attention. Coming from the academia, I am in a position to inform this committee that you have your job cut out for you, and it’s quite a huge one. The reason being that as the research proposals increase so also is the number of documents that you have to go through. The other reason is that we want to give every entry a fair opportunity in the contest, meaning that the Committee members will be challenged to go through every document in order to achieve a very fair assessment of every submission,” he said.

Danbatta reminded the committee of the few requirements that stand out in the evaluation criteria that a proposal must meet. He said the criteria include: clear statement and explanation of the problem; proposed solution to the problem; clear relevance to the telecommunication industry; evidence of local realisation up to prototype and cost reasonableness (cost of actualising the idea excluding furniture and allowances).

According to him, others include: schedule of project organisation; coherent presentation and packaging of concept; and integration of research with education (capacity building of students via the implementation of the project in the institution). “I want to state here very categorically that our budget is not elastic due to the prevailing economy which is slowly rising out of recession, I will want to quickly add that the commission is very passionate about students getting involved in implementing proposals and being given the opportunity to contribute to develop new solutions for the telecommunications sector.

“For this reason we are irrevocably committed to the implementation of the selected proposals and can vouch for their sustainability into the foreseeable future. Let me personally canvass that we pick proposals with definite timelines of implementation,” Danbatta said.

 – Sept 15, 2017 @ 12:05 GMT |