Engr Funlayo Kadri is a graduate of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Queen Mary College, University of London.
Her NYSC year was with Nigerian External Telecommunications Service (NET), Marina, Lagos. Due to her diligence, she was offered a job with LM Ericsson, Nigeria Ltd and resumed there on completion of her youth service.
While at Ericsson, she met her life long mentor, Engr Mrs Olu Maduka, FNSE, FAEng, and together with four other women they founded the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria ( APWEN), 38 years ago. She served APWEN as it’s 2nd Secretary-General.
An experienced electrical engineer who has worked in consultancy and contracting, she has developed management skills running various businesses. She is a Director of Nergify Ltd, a start up Energy company specialising in power solutions. She is also a director of AKW Eng. Ltd., a multidisciplinary engineering outfit in Lagos and has interests in other ventures.
Funlayo is COREN registered and a Fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers. She has served the NSE in various capacities on different committees of Council and in the EXCO of the Electrical Division of NSE – the NIEEE. She is also a member of the Nigerian Institution of Environmental Engineers.
A serial entrepreneur, she presently serves as pioneer Chairman of the Business, Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship Committee (BESCOM) of APWEN. She leads the committee with passion and commitment.
Funlayo loves to work with young people of all ages, though an unrepentant disciplinarian, and is a STEM advocate, inspiring both males and females to take-up science and engineering as a career.
Engr Mrs Kadri believes that the professions, and in particular, engineering, need women in the workforce and in key decision-making positions in this millennium, more than ever before, in order to deliver innovative value-adding solutions for sustainable development.
Engineers’ Forum looks at women in engineering and entrepreneurship as she takes us through the challenge of doing business in Nigeria with the attendant difficulties in the power sector.
It is good to know that you are a founding member of Association of Professional Women of Nigeria, APWEN. Would you say APWEN has achieved her set goals especially in the area of girl child education?
While APWEN has achieved so many successes in girl child education – particularly in STEM – I cannot say that we have achieved our set goals. When we started just short of 40 years ago, we wanted, firstly to support one another in a male-dominated, and often hostile, work environment. Our initial inclinations were to affirm and be pillars of support for each other. It was in that time that we discovered that we needed to demystify the profession so that more girls would enter into it and we could have a critical mass. It may surprise you to hear that a number of my schoolmates ( from Queen’s College, Lagos – brilliant ones ( I mean ‘igi iwes’)) – dropped out of engineering here in Nigeria and moved into other courses. And in my college in the UK, out of 3 girls in our year in the Electrical engineering faculty, one (a white girl and my dear friend) dropped out in the 2nd year! It was a tough space for females to be in! The attrition rate was high! In school, gender molestation still continues to be an issue. In the employment terrain, it is the same story – discrimination and sexual molestation. Many female engineers would simply lose confidence and change direction. The ones in civil service generally remained while those in private practice were edged out through non-inclusion. Don’t forget that those were the days when ‘good girls’ were seen and not heard! But, if all the girls and young women whom APWEN is supporting, more than 300 of them continue to tertiary institutions , graduate and are retained in the profession, APWEN’s aspirations would have been sizeably achieved and yet there’s still a long way to go.
We were consciously aware of these issues which is why we proceeded to engage secondary school girls to choose engineering.
So, going back to your question, No, we have not achieved our set goals and Yes, concerning girl child education, we have been hugely helped to make a sizable difference. Imagine the ripple effect of such a large number of girls entering the profession and remembering that women helped them. They will do the same and we will have a multiplier effect. However, Parents remain a hindrance to girls choosing engineering and engineering-related studies. My mother was vehemently against her daughter studying a ‘man’s job’! Electrical engineering was a compromise position – she had been told that it was gentler and more lady-like!
So APWEN’s other goals remain and are being pursued – the inclusion of women in every technical/technology area with the Town and Gown programme. The Diversity & Inclusion policy which seeks to entrench, as policy, women’s inclusion in key positions, starting with the PEIs and to board rooms.
APWEN was established in 1982 and the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 marked a significant turning point for the global agenda for gender equality. Would you say the founder and founding members saw ahead of Beijing declarations?
The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development, and Peace had as its goals legal equality for women. Back in 1982 when we first began to meet, we wanted firstly to be allowed to ‘be’. To be engineers who also happened to be women. Many of us were from the South and had role models of independent women. We knew that women could succeed. We knew we could be effective. But the PEIs and establishment didn’t quite know how to handle women on project sites; sitting at project meetings etc. If the truth be told, I don’t think we asked for legal equality but as events unfolded, we began to realise that we needed that legal equality also.
The groundswell of women wanting this legal equality is what culminated in the Beijing Declaration. It was the common aspirations of women who wanted and needed to be backed to work for the promotion of peace and development of our world.There was and is a perspective missing in the quality of decisions being made concerning our common space and inheritance.
So, yes, I believe APWEN saw ahead of the Beijing Declaration. But it is not yet Uhuru.
Take us on a journey of engineering entrepreneurship, why are most engineering businesses closed down after one or two generations in Nigeria?
The Nigerian entrepreneur, whether engineers or any other, is faced with a succession problem. In addition, you will agree with me that for much of our existence as a nation, government was, for quite a while (and possibly still is) the biggest dependable employer of labour and purveyor of professional services! In such a situation, the inevitable happened! We were churning out professionals but there was no sustained industrial revolution which would have spun off different vibrant sectors with the need for professional services and other ancillary services. Craftsmen, artisans, technicians and technologists, together, would all have been happy. The Nigerian economy couldn’t sustain us all. Not just engineers! The professions, in general. The ‘charge and bail lawyers’; the accountants turned bookkeepers; the architects earning money by appending their seal to work done by a draftsman for a fee and all sorts of ‘survival’ of the fittest. When you think about it, the average John Doe or Ngozi Abu could not afford professional services. It was cheaper to use a Shara from the neighborhood who had learned from a master who learned from another master who had once worked in an Italian firm. Never mind that Shara didn’t complete his apprenticeship. So you see, I don’t know where to put the blame and I don’t claim to have an answer to all these questions you have put to me. (Chuckle). However, there’s no doubt that lack of industrialisation to engender a bustling economy is responsible for the failure of many engineering enterprises!
And I appreciate this privilege to share my thoughts on these issues.
The entrepreneurial engineer is the one who is able to feel the pulse of the market and make a foray into it. If an engineer goes into farming, she will become intimately familiar with the process and discover where refinements may be made with technology. An engineer who is involved in the waste disposal business will bring technological refinements to the process. This could be in the collection, sorting or processing steps. And so many other ventures. What I am saying is that, we, the Engineers need to invest in all parts of the economy so that we can affect development where it is needed. When we become entrepreneurial – customer-centric and profit-conscious, we will be better prepared to build a lasting business. One engineering enterprise which always comes to my mind and which has made a mark in the area of addressing agricultural produce processing is Addis Engineering. Another entrepreneurial engineering business making inroads in electrical product manufacture is Momas. Not to speak of all the many innovations in FIIRO and our various research institutions – still waiting for well-heeled entrepreneurial engineers to review them and see which are market-ready.
I have learned much about engineering entrepreneurship since the time that I stopped running my contracting and consulting business. That is why I can speak like this. We should also include succession planning in our business operations plan. Succession plan for staff also, not just for ownership! Collaboration with like minds and willingness to get a share of the cake where it is not possible to get all of it. Financial forecasting is a vital part of the business operation also. Back then, we relied on government as the largest purveyors of professional services but that was risky because government is famous for not paying bills! However, with the latest development of contractors taking their grievances to court, government will be better aligned to settling their bills. So, this is another reason why engineering businesses failed – bad debts not adequately planned for.
I also think that many Nigerians have become despondent – losing faith in the system – and often choose to be spoilers in order to eke out a living. You know that corruption and bad governance has plagued this nation from the mid 60s and even more so after the War!
As a sovereign state, we have not had enough time to develop workable systems which are US! Take the matter of the civil service. The British civil service provided every home comfort for their citizens posted to the colonies – with accommodation in GRA, domestic staff, home maintenance etc. I believe that one of the biggest mistakes we made was when we chose to have a senior service class to whom were extended the same considerations as the foreigners. Nigerians holding the now vacant positions, lived like expats in their own land. That was when, I think, the civil service began to be self-serving and not servants to the people. In the 80s, I was one of those calling for monetized benefits for civil servants because I was conscious of how this squandering had created a bloated group of people who had no idea what it means to earn a living and live according to their means and position. If you follow me, you will see that this is one of the reasons why our infrastructure was poorly executed.
We now had a new privileged class who lived in exclusive enclaves – far from the people they were to serve. Remember that they are civil servants. Please remind me, what do servants do?! In Lagos, for example, Ikoyi had the best infrastructure and continued to be reasonably well maintained. But the other parts of the city, and of the state, didn’t get their quota of infrastructure because the person on the seat was comfortable in the oppressor’s enclave and would, without compunction, ‘die’ large parts of the project funds, if not kill it completely! Till today I believe that we will not see the structural development we need until we stop paying the way of civil servants AND politicians.
Let every politician be supported by whatever the supporters can afford. Why should reps from a poor constituency be living like kings when the electorate who put them there are living the same way they were before he/she got to represent them?!
If we reduce just this overhead, we can push further in our drive for infrastructure provision for industrial and economic progress.
As you know, the size of investment in infrastructure is a very good indicator of industrialization and consequently a vibrant economy. With more money available for infrastructure investment and changing the industrial environment, more businesses, including, and especially engineering businesses, would have boundless opportunities to thrive and survive.
We have the National Content Act and Executive Order 5, to what extent have they been implemented looking at the teeming youth unemployment?
Not much. Having said that, let me clarify. The Executive Order 5 has to do mostly with procurement by government ministries, departments and MDAs. The Nigerian Content Act defines Nigerian content in Section 106 as “the quantum of composite value added to or created in Nigeria through the utilization of Nigerian resources and services in the petroleum industry resulting in the development of indigenous capability without compromising quality, health, safety, and environmental standards”.
I believe that the youth unemployment issue goes beyond just these 2 documents. It starts from the very foundation of these youth – from their education. Granted that enrollment of school age children has greatly increased, I’m not sure that the Universal Basic Education system has delivered on its goals of providing free and compulsory education to every child. ‘Education’ being the operative word there. The quality of education is so poor that Nigeria still ranks in the 100s out of 118 countries in UNESCO’s Education for All (EFA) Development index.Part of the problem is the generally low quality of teachers. Have we forgotten that teachers fail on-the-spot tests of basic primary subject knowledge? Therefore, what I’m saying is that the National Content Act and Executive Order 5, as good as and as necessary as they are, will not be making any noticeable difference to this group of people. This is a truth which even the youth will not want to hear because of the entitlement mentality we have bequeathed to them.
So let me ask you, which part of procurement do you want to give someone who is not able to read a simple shopping list? Or how do you ask a person to produce a vital part of of an equipment when she or he does not know the difference between a square profile and a rectangular profile?
My heart bleeds because of what corruption has done to the very basic education of the Nigerian child.
I don’t know if you now understand my answer to this question.
The group of youth whom these 2 documents will reposition and remove from the unemployment bracket are those who are fairly well educated like the ones whom APWEN’s ‘Tools and Tiara’ programme work with. We have helped train female engineering graduates as welders. These ones know the difference between a square profile and a rectangular profile!
Let’s look at the recent CBN policy which suspends the activities of BDC, what effect will it have on businesses and the economy in general?
The immediate effect was the increase in price of everything you buy. Even gari! With regard to businesses, the cost of providing services and equipment has gone up. Though, I think the free fall of the Naira has stabilised and remains at what it was 3 months ago – underground black market! If the banks sell to verified businesses, the foreign currency they need to continue running their businesses, we may have a win-win situation. The price of solar panels, for example, had been climbing steadily from the middle of the year and has stayed not too far from that presently! I am aware that many punters are keeping their dollars to when Naira falls a great deal so they can cash out! If any Nigerian is praying that the Naira will depreciate more so that they can make a killing, it means that we don’t love this country! If we don’t love Nigeria, we cannot complain when it bites us! This figure of speech I have used is to encourage us all to support the effort to shore up our currency.
For businesses especially, and everyone, a better Naira will ensure a better life for us all internally. For the most benefit, though, those gains should be ploughed into providing electricity and other infrastructure so that our products will be competitive. You know that a strong Naira and expensive locally produced merchandise will destroy our manufacturing businesses completely. That is bad business!
I am sure like many Nigerians, you are monitoring the FG/Siemens deal implementation with bated breath knowing that electricity power remains the cornerstone to entrepreneurship. What is your assessment of the Nigeria Electricity Supply Industry concerning this deal?
Ah! NESI! NESI is so multi-faceted that the average Nigerian doesn’t really understand it or even what it is!. NESI is an organic creature and like any organic creature, it can have coordination issues, dysfunction, malfunction and what have you.
The FG/Siemen’s deal, is a great initiative and I applaud President Buhari for supporting it in its entirety. If this is not a digression, Mr President has followed an aggressive infrastructure provision pattern which I can only compare to that which happened in the Gowon years when ‘Money’ was ‘not our problem but how to spend it’ I salute President Buhari and his advisers for such determination.
So, the Siemens deal should progress our energy production and delivery to a good place. The first place is 7GW available to consumers by 2021! I want to remain optimistic that we will still hit that first target. Though I am a little apprehensive because there continues to be buck-passing in the ranks of transmission and distribution players in NESI! I thought that had been resolved before the discos co-signed the deal? If they are still not certain where the problem is between them, how then did they agree on the items to be purchased via the agreement in order to give us 7GW this year and 11GW in 2023? I think those were the system bottlenecks we were told would be fixed first! When we arrive in 2023 with ‘promise kept’, I shall dare to make a comment about the final destination.
This project has to succeed because without it Nigeria cannot be industrialised in any significant sense. And our enterprises will remain uncompetitive in the world market because of high energy cost due to self-generation of electricity. What can be more frustrating to enterprise development than the knowledge that you are set up to be uncompetitive from scratch? I don’t want to say more than that!
One of your passions is youth mentorship. What would you say are the challenges of youths towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and how can they be addressed?
I believe that earlier in this interview I revealed my feelings about the most basic problem of education facing the ones we call the future of Nigeria. Education. Education. And Education!
Firstly, The teachers are generally poorly trained so STEM teaching has not fared well. Poorly trained teachers cannot give more than they have except they personally upskill themselves or are trained by their schools when employed. Lagos State is doing a wonderful job in this area. And the teachers who embrace these opportunities often spark an interest in the children for learning.
Secondly, Schools are poorly funded and therefore poorly equipped. Schools have no labs and do ‘Alternative to Practical’. A love for STEM is sparked by investigation of nature which doesn’t happen without live practicals.
STEM teachers are poorly supported. Most subjects need the books and a board to communicate knowledge. But STEM subjects need instructional aids more than the other subjects. These can be very expensive. Very few students opt for Science subjects in Senior Secondary School!
Our association, APWEN has tried to ameliorate these deficiencies in our own small way by through technical boot camps like the MAYEN ADETIBA TECHNICAL BOOT CAMP FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS. Several APWEN chapters engage with students in different science and maths programmes. Of Special mention is the TRAIN THE TRAINERS INITIATIVE supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering which was designed and run by the Immediate past President of APWEN, Engr Felicia Agubata, FNSE, PhD. STEM teachers from the 6 geopolitical zones of the nation were trained to improvise common and cheap, even free, everyday items to make the teaching of science more enjoyable to the children.
As a nation we are left behind in developmental innovations, where do you see Nigeria in the next 10 years in engineering innovation?
We do not lack ideas nor do we lack the will. The ecosystem may not be conducive but that has not prevented innovative ideas from being developed. Many have succeeded and have raised angel funds from outside Nigeria. Especially in the IT space and what is Financial Technology, also known as fintech. In fact, these technological companies which are delivering services in healthcare, Agriculture, and finance are the new economy in Nigeria. What about the logistics firms addressing distribution of goods and services? These are all developmental innovations. And if we can do this in our low-industrialized state, I can only foresee Nigeria reaching greater heights in the next 10 years. Technology is helping to leapfrog different sectors of our economy into the 21st century and if we get it right with electricity supply, we are more than likely going to catch up.
Government has done something notable by encouraging technovation hubs. There are innovation competitions out there. APWEN’s 2021 INNOVATE CHALLENGE is lessening innovative energy solutions. The results will be revealed during APWEN ‘s National Conference in September. The Nigerian Society of Engineers has just launched the YOUNG ENGINEERS INNOVATION COMPETITION. Our university students are spawning very good ideas so investment is the next thing needed to catapult our technological progress. And particularly, if our moneyed class put their money into tech innovation and development, I believe we are set to be in a good place.
If you are not working, how do you relax?
That is a very difficult question to answer because, presently, with this pandemic, I work from home, almost exclusively. The days and nights merge into each other. My colleagues make me a butt of their quips when I’m found outside of my home. But I can tell you, without equivocation, that I love reading, searching out information and just learning new things. I have a kindle account which library has hundreds of books. I also have a collection of audio books and dozens and dozens of different Bible versions. Not to talk of my other physical books! So, yes, I’m an information junkie!! Another enjoyable pastime is dancing – I enjoy music and will tap my feet nod my head to any decent music in any language. (Chuckle). I forgot to mention that I like languages and am presently making a foray into learning Chinese(Mandarin)!
I think it’s important to laugh, love, and connect. A merry heart brings healing to your body. Give yourself permission to let your hair down and experience the gamut of refreshing emotions.
