The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) has called for an agenda-driven partnership to achieve a common vision on Research and Development (R&D) delivery in the oil and gas industry.
The board emphasised the need to attract sustainable funding as a major tool needed for R & D, innovation and entrepreneurship to create value in the Nigerian oil and gas industry.
Mr Abdulmalik Halilu, the General Manager, Research, Statistics and Development Division, NCDMB made the call on Wednesday in Abuja at a Nigerian content capacity-building workshop for media stakeholders.
The workshop has its theme as “Enhancing Media Competencies to Support Nigerian Content in a Gas Economy’’.
He said the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development (NOGICD) Act 2010 established NCDMB as the sole agency of Federal Government responsible for driving Nigerian Content in the oil and gas industry.
According to him, the oil sector is a global business that does not compromise standard, hence there is need to ensure optimal capacity and utilisation of specified schedule to achieve local content standard.
He said its 10-year R&D roadmap anchored on eight success pillar for systematic development research and innovation, thereby underscored the need to have competitive and well-structured research and development system.
Halilu said the roadmap was aimed at developing and maintaining healthy pipelines of competent researchers and translating research results into products and services that would be deployed for industry application.
He said its goal was to have an effect on inclusive, transparent, solution and demand-driven R&D governance structure to drive its delivery.
He said the essence of making provision of it in the act was to ensure R&D ecosystem, which captured the needs of the industry was driven by research.
He underscored social media’s relevance in identifying professionals, sources of data, literature review, data collection, pitching, product validation, dissemination of research findings.
“There is need for research and documentation dialogue providing a networking platform for project promoters, researchers, and regulators to dialogue on imperatives of enabling R&D ecosystem to National development.
On information sharing, he encouraged using various media platforms to share information on reearch breakthroughs with high prospects of commercialisation.
He listed five sponsored R& D excellence centres of the board located in five institutions to include Federal University of Technology Minna, Federal University of Technology Akure, Niger Delta University, Bayelsa, Federal University of Technology Owerri and Modibbo Adamawa University of Technology, Yola.
Mr Ahmed Sa’id, Faculty Head, Kaduna Media Academy also exposed the media practitioners on Journalism Entrepreneurship tagged: “Beyond the Bylines: Leveraging to Earn More’’.
The workshop featured other presentations including ‘Linking business journalism to community concerns’’ by Mr Chido Nwakanma, an Adjunct Faculty, Pan Atlantic University and remarks by Mr Obinna Ezeobi, the Chief Supervisor, Corporate Communications, NCDMB.
