The Ondo State Government has disbursed a sum of N230m in bursary and scholarship awards to students of the state.
The beneficiaries of the money, which was disbursed through the Oil Producing Area Development Commission, are students from Ilaje and Ese Odo Local Government Areas of the state.
Speaking on the gesture, the Chairman of OSOPADEC, Mr. Gbenga Edema, said 5,216 students from the mandate areas benefited from the scheme.
According to him, 33 of the beneficiaries are Ph.D students while 96 are from the Masters degree programme category. He added that the rest were undergraduates studying in different tertiary institutions in the country.
Edema said each of the Ph.D students got N150,000, while Masters and Law students were also given N150,000. The sum of N40,000, was given to undergraduate students.
Edema added that the commission was also planning to grant full scholarship to beneficiaries in the Ph.D category and increase the number of students benefitting from the scheme to encourage hard work among them.
The chairman, however, said that some of the beneficiaries must have graduated because the immediate past government allegedly failed to redeem its pledge to release the bursary and scholarship funds.
He noted that the current bursary was supposed to have been distributed to the beneficiaries in 2015, but the then government allegedly failed to disburse it.
The wife of the state governor, Mrs. Betty Akeredolu, who distributed the cheques to the students, urged them to make judicious use of the money to better their education and contribute to the development of their areas.
