I am very pleased to welcome you to the British Council Nigerian website.
The British Council was established in 1934 and has been in Nigeria since 1943.Nigeria has at least 16 cities with populations over 750,000.Three of Africa’s 15 largest urban areas are in Nigeria. Lagos, the country’s previous capital is Africa’s most populous city; Kano in the North West, Ibadan in the South-West and Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta also have significant populations.
The scale of Nigeria means that no one organisation can do everything. Our approach is to partner with the right UK and Nigerian organisations to give us the widest possible impact. Our track record and longevity in Nigeria means that we have well-established relationships that have survived through many years of change. We have a reputation for listening and enabling that has brought us a range of partnership organisations that invested in our programmes – from Federal and State Governments, to NGO’s to the private sector.
We focus on capacity building and sustainability in the designing, developing and delivering of our programmes. Wherever possible this is inputted from the beginning and thereby offering our partners the support they need to take ownership and stay successful. This also increases the impact to investment ratio and value for money of our programmes. In the long term this helps to deliver real change to scale.
In the North, we are expanding our work in Kano, which was our first office in Nigeria and is a key economic centre; we are also expanding our work in Sokoto, a key historic and cultural centre, as well as Jigawa which has some of the lowest human development indicators in Nigeria. In the South West, we work in Lagos, the economic hub of the West African region and Oyo, which is an emerging industrial centre. In the South, we work in Rivers which is the centre of Nigeria’s energy industry and an emerging industrial base that presents significant opportunities for skills development; we also work in Cross River which is a developing tourism centre with similar opportunities to expand our skills and education programmes. In the South-East, we work in Enugu, which is the administrative centre of the region, to support emerging opportunities across the manufacturing and trading centres of the region. Enugu also presents opportunities to build on our successful work in justice reform, policing and countering gender based violence, and our engagements with senior policy makers are in Abuja, Federal Capital Territory.
Across the country we are also seeking opportunities to build on our innovative work in arts, education, English, exams, society and particularly in peace building and gender to integrate it more with our work with young people. We concentrate our engagement with senior policy makers in Abuja, Federal Capital Territory.
All our work in Nigeria is helping to build a safer and more prosperous future for the Nigerian people which in turn contributes to the UK’s own economic and security interests.
Lucy Pearson,
Country Director, Nigeria