The United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc’s corporate social responsibility arm, the UBA Foundation, has announced that students now have until October 28, 2022, to submit their entries. The top three winners of this year’s National Essay Competition (NEC) will receive educational grants worth N10.5 million to study at any African university of their choice.

The first prize winner will get a N5 million grant, a substantial increase of 40% above the N3.5 million grant that was awarded as the winning prize the previous year.
In place of the N2.5 million and N2 million educational grants awarded to the second and third place winners, respectively, the winners will now get N3 million and N2.5 million.

The authors of the top 12 essays will get monetary prizes in addition to brand-new laptops and other educational resources to aid them in their post-secondary research and other coursework.

As part of the UBA Foundation’s educational program, senior secondary school students in Nigeria and throughout the African continent are encouraged to participate in the annual National Essay rivalry (NEC), which aims to promote literacy and healthy, intellectual rivalry.

This year’s essay topic is “ASUU Strikes have frequently cost Nigerian students time.” Give the Nigerian government advice on how to work with ASUU to improve postsecondary education in the nation.

The UBAF NEC digital submission portal, located at https://www.ubagroup.com/national-essay-competition/, allows students from Senior Secondary Schools all over Nigeria to easily submit their entries from the comfort of their homes or schools. As a result, the Foundation encourages students to participate in the essay competition this year.

Students can also ask to have their handwritten essays scanned and posted onto the portal for them by simply walking into any UBA Branch nationwide.

All essays must be written by hand, not by typing. Students will not be accepted with physical copies this year; instead, they must upload scanned copies of their handwritten entries and their IDs to the digital portal by October 28, 2022.

To give more African children the chance, the NEC has also been implemented in other African nations where UBA conducts business.