EnergyNet exposes students to global energy industry

Ghanaian undergraduate, Audrey Ntiwaa Okyere, is eager to make an impact on the job market when she graduates from the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

Whilst industry players in the energy sector complain they struggle to get great talents to fill positions, Audrey observes students are also not getting the requisite exposure to prepare for work.

She says students strive to acquire the knowledge, but lack the skills to perform.

“Students, as it stands now, have not being endowed with so much capacity; when you enter into the university right now and you graduate, you don’t have that exposure to the industries,” she said.

Audrey believes students can offer their optimum best to industry when they have the right linkages with companies.

She is among 32 brilliant students from Africa participating in the ‘EnergyNet Student Engagement Initiative (ESEI)’, spearheaded by EnergyNet Limited and sponsored by Aggreko and Norton Rose Fulbright.

The students from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia traveled to Dubai to meet investors at the 2015 Africa Energy Forum for the next step towards further development and employment.

Managing Director of EnergyNet Limited, Simon Gosling, says the program is grooming talented students from economics, legal and engineering backgrounds for employment.

“It’s really providing the students an opportunity but what is important for us is that the story of electricity is that it creates jobs and creates economic development,” he said.

According to him, most of twenty students who participated in the program last year have had opportunities to work with firms that participate in the Forum.

“The whole story of electricity in Africa is very important to us and that is why we want to engage with the students, give them these opportunities but also it creates value [for the companies],” said Mr. Gosling.

Also on the program is Joseph Arthur, a graduate student in finance at the KNUST School of Business. He is learning the challenge in producing power in Africa is more of regulatory and political will.

“We have generation issues, transmission issues and then collection of proceeds from the energy, so we intended to know what is the way forward given these difficulties and we realized that there are various public-private partnership agreements which are being signed across board,” he shared.

Joseph, like his colleagues, is excited at the exposure to the energy industry and the opportunities to be employment after school.

Story by Kofi Adu Domfeh