MTN Foundation has awarded a total of 8400 student scholarships in the last eight years, the Foundation’s Education Portfolio Manager Pamela Emodi has said.
Emodi who disclosed this in an interview with Daily Trust after an MTN Foundation’s empowerment programme in Abuja said the foundation was giving each students N200,000 every year, started from their 200 level till they graduated .
Also speaking on the scholarship, a director of the foundation, Dennis Okoro said the foundation since inception had invested over N20billion on youth capacity building towards a better future.
Mr Okoro added that the MTN scholarship is different from other types of scholarship because it follows due process before arriving at its awardees.
He said, “MTN Foundation is a child of MTN Nigeria as it is the usual practice some cooperate organizations just do cooperate social responsibility in a type of adhoc base they may decide to give bicycle or scholarship but when MTN came to Nigeria through research they found out that if you are operating in an environment and if the environment is happy you will grow your business and you don’t grow your business by concentrating on profit alone when you make your profit you plan back it makes you to increase your coverage and people will be happy we have over 54million clearance in MTN.
‘’What they did was to create a separate board to focus on cooperate social responsibility and they gave us a percentage of the profit to operate I have been there for twelve years we have spent over 20billion on this kind of thing.”
He revealed that over 1000 students have being awarded this year alone.
He said there was a reduction in the numbers of inducted awardees this year due to economic downtown.”
“It is affecting us too so rather than stopping we reduced the number’’, Mr Dennis said.
