Widow's Mite 2.0
A United States-based charity organisation, Kedrick Scribner Foundation, has pledged commitment to assisting the nation’s underprivileged with the acquisition of tertiary education, saying education is a right that should not be denied due to lack of resources.
Disclosing this during a three-day programme, themed: ‘The Widow’s Mite 2.0, held at the United Church of Christ in Lagos, the foundation awarded university scholarships to 25 children of police widows who successfully passed their Senior School Certificate Examination.
In addition, the foundation offered one-year medical insurance to 180 police widows in Lagos State.
Speaking at the programme, Founder of the foundation, Dr Kedrick Scribner, said with the scholarship, the widows can now achieve their dreams of sending their children to school.
Scribner said: “For students that are entering colleges, we are going to give them full scholarships from 100 level to the final level as long as they keep their grades up.
“If you don’t keep your grades up, we cannot continue the scholarship. This scholarship will give light to some children that would never have the opportunity to pay for university education.
“From the scholarship, we have 25 students but this is not the end of the process because even if you have a child in the primary or secondary school, we have a scholarship for you. We programmed 100 women for medical insurance but we ended up giving 150 of them the insurance cover for the next year.”
Also speaking, the President/Founder of Byinks Foundation, Banire Olayinka, said the scholarship will cover acceptance fees and school fees for the duration of the course.
He said, “We are going to ensure that we help them gain admission into our federal universities. We are also going to take some students that are already in school to see how we can support them in a few ways and those that are about to gain admission to follow up on them.
“The modality of selection is that the students must be from public school, they must be from this community, they must be children of widows and they must be orphans with quality West Africa Examination Council, WAEC, results.
On his part, US Representative of Washington DC, Dr. Oye Owolewa, said: “I have decided to be here to give back to my people and also show them what could be done when you have a good heart. The efforts of The Kedrick Scribner Foundation would restore hope because we have people who have lost it all and people who live in areas that are not conducive.
“This is our way of telling them that we care and we are trying to bring the private sector and other Nigerian-Americans to the table not only to do what we are doing right now but making it bigger in supporting other communities that deserve this as well.
“I hope that my presence will inspire people to do more. You don’t have to be an elected official or a person of note, you just have to care. But there is an added level of responsibility for us Nigerian-American to come back home, see where we are from especially if you are born in America like myself, to see that there are opportunities for us to get involved in the betterment of the people from our communities.”
