Abuja, July 3, 2024 – The federal government has reacted to Peter Obi’s claim that Nigerians were not selected for the Harvard Business School programme because of the country’s negative image.
Obi, the Presidential Candidate of the Labour Party in 2023 election, on Wednesday said Nigerians were not invited to participate in Harvard’s 2025 programme on global immersion because of the poor image of the country.
He said that while four other African countries were invited to participate, Nigeria was not considered for the programme because of its poor image abroad..
Fredrick Nwabufo, the Senior Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Public Engagement, while responding said there was no correlation between Harvard Business School’s prerogative of selection in its Field Global Immersion course and Nigeria’s image.
He said: “There is simply no correlation between Harvard Business School’s prerogative of selection in its Field Global Immersion course and Nigeria’s image.
“This is what the institution says on its blog as regards the selection of countries for the course.
“The FIELD Global Immersion (FGI) is a semester-long first-year (RC) MBA course. The course is a capstone of sorts, and it requires students to build on learnings from their first-year courses and apply them to real-world business problems. At the beginning of the semester students are paired with a Global Partner (GP) company in one of 16 cities that has a product or service challenge they would like the team to address with their local consumers.
“At the beginning of the fall semester, students are given the opportunity to rank that year’s Immersion locations to which they would most like to travel. As the MBA population is very diverse (and often includes seasoned travelers) students are also given the opportunity to exclude locations to which they do not wish to travel based on where their home country is, and where they have extensive travel or professional experience.
“With these considerations in mind, country and team assignments (aka: Global Section assignments) are made via an algorithm that ensures diversity of gender and citizenship – much like their RC Sections! Projects are then assigned to teams at random being mindful of potential conflicts of interest.” (GBN)
