Commissioner for Insurance, Fola Daniel
Nnamdi Duru
The Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria (CIIN) has said insurance education in the country is not lagging behind international standards.
Director-General of the institute, Mr. Adesoji Adepegba, gave this pass mark in his review of the challenges facing insurance educating in the country in an interview with THISDAY in Lagos recently.
He acknowledged that the insurance institute has passed through some challenging times in its metamorphosis but submitted that the education arm of the industry had never lagged behind in terms of training and retraining programmes.
“There are still more to be done by the industry itself and the institute. I will say the CIIN is doing its best to ensure that those who will hold themselves out as professionals are well trained before they are certified.
“I think the insurance education in the country is not doing badly. I can say members of the industry are getting the best on training. We have also encouraged that education is not something you get from a particular source like the CIIN.
“We also encourage students and our members to develop and re-develop themselves. The Mandatory Continuing Programme Development (MCPD for example ensures that a student for training programmes, ensure that you write, carry out research, and attend programmes that can broaden their knowledge about the practice of insurance. I can say the insurance is Nigeria is gathering is gathering momentum,” the director-general said.
Adepegba noted that for anyone to hold himself out as a professional in insurance, he or she must have passed some prescribed examination is in three parts, which the institute conducts.
In addition to the conduct of professional examinations, he said the institute provided services that prepare students for the examinations.
“The institute has a college that has been put in place to ensure that we train those who would take the examinations and those that will come in for refresher courses. It also runs examination programmes and conducts on regular basis conferences, seminars, in house programmes and MCPD programmes.
Reflecting on the challenges facing the institute, Adepegba stated: “Finance is the major issue whether in the institute or incorporate organisation that is expected to send their staff for our programmes. I want to suspect, that the budget for training is falling and there might be some scaling down of budgets for staff training over the years. This is a major challenge because no matter how good and elaborate a training programme is, if we do not have more of our members attending there is a challenge.”
“Also, there is the challenge for our people to change in learning new things and asking more questions. There is also the challenge on research, raising qualified people who can impact knowledge on young practitioners.
“The challenge here is that the professionals have their primary duties and must meet certain targets in their officers. We have been trying to encourage these but it has not been easy. We try to encourage people to have mentors and build relationships but we still have some challenges. “We hope that so many good hands we have in industry, which may not be getting younger, there is need for us to begin to ask them to impact on others, he said.