CIIN pursues insurance culture through education

Determined to ensure that a larger population of the citizenry embrace insurance culture by getting quality education in insurance fields the Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria (CIIN) is vigorously pursuing its five-point agenda of entrenching insurance career across schools.

Forming key planks of its administration, Fatai Kayode Lawal, president of the CIIN said this was critical in actualising its mandate to transform the insurance industry through awareness creation.

Lawal who spoke at the presentation of books to tertiary institutions in Lagos weekend said that though the life of this administration commenced on June this year, his administration has worked concertedly towards the actualisation of its five-point Agenda.

These includes production of insurance textbook for Secondary Schools to actualise the Federal Government’s approval of insurance as a course of study in ‘O-Level’ examination; Support for accredited tertiary institutions offering insurance to enhance their capacity to offer quality education; reinforcement of activities at the College of Insurance and Financial Management; completion of the ongoing restructuring of the Institute’s Secretariat to enhance operational efficiency and effective service delivery and resuscitation of the Institute’s Victoria Island Building Project.

“These, no doubt command the significant signposts for developing a lasting legacy in the promotion and sustenance of insurance education and for ensuring that we entrench the standards requisite for the production of an excellent workforce for the insurance sub-sector of the national economy.

Let me reiterate that the theme of my presidency is borne out of the belief that we can only create the necessary insurance awareness where people are fairly and reasonably educated about it. The less than optimal financial literacy in Nigeria today is at the root of poor patronage of financial services and insurance happens to be one of the most affected in the sector, Lawal noted.

According to him, “the Nigerian population currently has just about 3,500 professionally qualified insurance practitioners out of about 160,000,000 people. Getting only 3,500 educated out of this figure is a far cry. The only way we can get insurance to penetrate every nook and cranny of this country is to get more people involved as crusaders for insurance. This, we believe is the way to go.”

“Therefore, the donation of books to tertiary institutions today is not only significant as a landmark commitment to our growth agenda, it also forms part of a series of actions geared at accelerating the empowerment of institutions offering insurance courses across Nigeria,” Lawal said.

Lawal noted further that other areas of concentration to achieve the set goals includes development of study centres in accredited tertiary institutions; encouragement of lecturers in such institutions by ensuring that they have access to relevant information about insurance and to avail them the opportunity and exposure to conferences and seminars on insurance.

By: Uzoma Okonkwo