COREN Emerges Provisional Signatory Of Washington Accord

The Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) has become a professional signatory of Washington Accord making Nigeria the second African member of the body.

Washington Accord (WA) signed in 1989, under the International Engineering Alliance, is an international multi-lateral agreement between bodies responsible for accreditation or recognition of tertiary-level engineering qualifications within their jurisdictions who have chosen to work collectively to assist the mobility of professional engineers.

There are currently 21 countries in the WA, including UK, USA, Germany, Canada, Japan, China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, Singapore, Hongkong, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Switzerland, South-Africa, etc.

The Accord acknowledges that accreditation of engineering academic programmes is a key foundation for the practice of engineering at the professional level in each of the countries or territories covered by the Accord.

COREN expressed interest in becoming a member of the WA in 2018 and officially submitted its application in 2019, which could not receive the minimum required number of votes from other signatories.

The president of COREN, Engr Sadiq Zubair Abubakar, disclosed this in a statement yesterday.

He said in pursuant to achieving this goal, COREN organised and hosted the Train-the-Trainers Workshops on Outcome-Based Education for University Implementors in all the six geo-political zones of the federation where 545 individuals were trained.

Abubakar said the Outcome-Based Assessment (OBA) Programme Evaluators Workshop was also organised and held in two locations where a total of 307 OBA Programme Evaluators were trained.

According to him, a database of all certified trainees from these trainings was established by COREN for storing, management and retrieval for use to meet the rising demands of OBE accreditation exercises. So far, a total of 12 Engineering programmes have been accredited under the OBE system and counting.

He added that the six-man COREN delegation was led by Abubakar to represent Nigeria at the annual IEA meetings for 2023 which was hosted by the Institute of Engineering Education Taiwan (IEET) and Chinese Institute of Engineers (CIE).