By Philip Yatai

The Environmental Health Officers Registration Council of Nigeria (EHORECON) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) to implement a new curriculum for environmental health technology training.

EHORECON Registrar, Dr Dominic Abonyi, who signed on behalf of the council in Kaduna on Monday, explained that the curricular was designed for National Diploma and Higher National Diploma programmes.

Aboyi said that the move was part of efforts to ensure that training for prospective environmental health professionals at all levels was done in accordance with global best practices.

“The review of the curriculum began in August 2015 by EHORECON, in collaboration with NBTE and was concluded in 2017.

“It was launched in July 2018, and will take effect from the 2018/2019 academic session.

“The curricular was designed to meet the current training needs of technologists and improve the standard of training in the environmental health profession as a whole.

“Therefore, signing the MoU became imperative to ease the accreditation processes and quality assurance by accredited schools and colleges for full implementation,” he said.

Aboyi called on schools of health technology to urgently facilitate the accreditation of environmental health programmes.

According to him, the council has already given a timeline to shut down all unaccredited programmes from 2019/2020 academic session.

“Our country needs quality environmental health professionals to meet up with the presidential declaration of state of emergency on environment sanitation and hygiene.

“As a professional body, we are duty bound to ensure that the needed manpower in the area were well trained and equipped with the needed skills to turn Nigeria’s environmental and hygiene situation around for the good of the country.’’

On his part, Dr Masa’udu Kazaure, who signed on behalf of NBTE, said that the measure would ensure standard and quality in training and equally ensure uniformity in accreditation exercise.

Kazaure, who is the Executive Secretary of the board, explained that training institutions had been complaining of double accreditation by the regulatory body and the professional body.

According to him, after a careful consideration of the complaints, the board has decided to harmonise all accreditation exercise with all relevant stakeholders as members.

“This means that the accreditation exercise will be carried out at the same time by the regulatory and professional bodies, thereby saving time and resources.”

He called on EHORECON to reach out to local government levels through strengthening the informal sector for private organisations to establish environmental health firms to support government in ensuring safe environment for all.

The NBTE boss said that the board would support EHORECON with the operational standard for the smooth take-off of the informal sector under the Nigerian Skills Qualification Framework.