LEARN Alliances & Success Stories
Edinburgh Business School Faculty Capacity Building in Nigeria
Ongoing project
LEARN Logistics collaborates with Edinburgh Business School (EBS) in the offering of Distance Learning Master Programs in Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management. Whereas Master students enroll directly at Edinburgh Business School and follow the program until graduation, LEARN Logistics supports the students potentially with partial scholarships and with locally delivered revision and intermediate student tutoring workshops. This combination turns a pure distance learning model into a hybrid learning approach and therefore increases the graduation rates significantly. The geographical focus of this collaboration is currently on Nigeria as well as on the Kyrgyzstan for the Central Asian countries.
In Nigeria, the demand for highly qualified master’s degree holders in LSCM, particularly from university faculty, is extraordinarily high. This is because the higher education regulations in the country required lecturers to possess a higher degree in the subject area than the one, they aim to teach. As a result, Nigerian academics must possess a LSCM master’s degree if they wish to teach in a LSCM bachelor program. Whereas this might already be a challenge in other countries, Nigeria is specific as of 2023, no bachelor study program related to logistics and supply chain management had been on offer nationwide. As part of LEARN Logistics partnerships with Nigerian universities, a brand new LSCM bachelor curriculum was accredited and will start with the first student cohorts in September 2024. Given this background, LEARN Logistics supports EBS to reach out to interested faculty from multiple Nigerian universities to qualify them for the upcoming delivery of the newly offered LSCM bachelor program. Whereas EBS takes the academic lead, LEARN Logistics support with local resources, organizational support, and workshop and transport stipends. Besides LEARN Logistics, numerous Nigerian states and universities cover for the tuition fees for their enrolled faculty at the EBS master’s in LSCM.
This partnership is a good example for the Outreach Model in which LEARN Logistics supports the scaling of international reputable programs to low- and middle-income countries and provides funding or co-funding to access such study programs.