The Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta will on Saturday hold its 3rd convocation during which 3567 undergraduates will be graduating out of which 120 made First Class with I626 finishing Second Class Upper.
A further breakdown shows that 1624 graduating students made Second Class Lower, 164 finished with Third Class and another 33 are graduates of Veterinary Medicine.
The Vice-Chancellor of the university, Prof Babatunde Kehinde disclosed this on Wednesday during a media briefing held to commemorate the university’s 32nd convocation which holds on Saturday.
Kehinde said, “There will also be 30 Postgraduate Diplomas, 274 Masters degrees graduates, and 136 PhD holders who will be part of the convocation.”
The VC explained that the university has equally added eight new academic programmes including Library and Information Science, Industrial Chemistry, Cyber Security, Software Engineering among others.
Kehinde said the university now runs 38 fully accredited programmes by the National University Commission with 54 departments.
Giving further progress of the university in the last year, the VC said that the NUC approved six research proposals of over N171m for its researchers while many of its scholars equally won international grants amounting to several thousands of dollars and Euros.
Kehinde hailed Tetfund for rising to the challenge of funding the universities saying that 19 projects cutting across academics and research are currently being undertaken by Tetfund in the university.
Answering questions on the challenge of food crisis in the country, the Vice-Chancellor said “We must explore the option of Public Private Partnerships to drive increase in food production.
“We have done that with 30 organisations and we are already seeing results. I equally encourage that we all embrace backyard farming, we all have to get involve to tackle this challenge”.
The VC also said that the school has received over N133m from the National Education Loans Fund for the first batch of 1300 students who applied for the student loan while another batch of 1638 is waiting to be credited for the year 2025.
Highlights of the convocation include the convocation lecture to be delivered by Mohammed Ibrahim, the Executive Secretary of, the National Agricultural Development Fund, an exhibition of farming machinery as well as honouring of two past Vice-Chancellors of the university; Prof Olusola Oyewole and Prof Kolawole Salako who would have some monuments named after them.