Ambassador’s Visit Launches Effort to Build a Bridge Between Nigeria and Smith

There are exceptional students from around the globe at the Smith School, and those that hail from Nigeria are among the business school's most outstanding. Smith is working to establish a relationship with the country that results in beneficial outcomes for students.

On Sept. 3, Acting Nigerian Ambassador to the U.S., Samson Itegboje and a delegation from the Nigerian Embassy visited Van Munching Hall. The visit was arranged by Smith’s Office of Career Services (OCS). In welcoming them, OCS Assistant Dean Kim Rice DeGross said, “Today’s gathering is the beginning of creating a partnership that will yield jobs for our students, new learning venues, and cultural connection to represent the shared vision of building bridges between countries, institutions and most importantly between people.”

The ambassador said he’s very proud that so many Nigerians are being educated at Smith and throughout the University of Maryland. “They will come back to Nigeria and make Nigeria great,” he said. “But I promise we will never leave this institution. We will continue to send our students here because we need the research.”

Several University of Maryland leaders spoke at the event, including the deans of the College of Arts and Humanities and the UMD graduate school, as well as the associate vice president of international affairs.

Smith Dean Prabhudev Konana was joined by Balaji Padmanabhan, Director of Smith’s Center for AI in Business and Wendy Sanhai, Visiting Professor of the Practice and Executive in Residence at the business school. The dean said, “We would like to make sure every student who comes here from Nigeria has the best opportunity here, in Nigeria and around the world. So, we want to look at this partnership as a way to enable corporations, whether American or Nigerian, to find this talent whether Nigerian companies grow in the U.S. or vice versa.” Ambassador Itegboje spoke about Nigeria’s hope for cooperation between the university and Nigerian colleges, “especially in artificial intelligence, healthcare, agriculture and other areas of mutual interest.”

Both Padmanabhan and Sanhai detailed the benefits of such an alliance. More than half of Nigeria’s population is under 20 years old, and Sanhai, a recognized leader in healthcare and global health, remarked on the significant healthcare challenges that the country faces. “So my humble ask is, how can we work together to address some of these formidable healthcare challenges? No one entity can do it by itself,” she said. “It becomes imperative that we work across federal, state and local governments to achieve the goals that we hope to achieve together.”

During the Q&A part of the program, the ambassador answered questions from students. Mojuba Shonekan, MSBA ’25, who is earning his Master of Science in Business Analytics, explained why he felt it was important to hear from Itegboje. “I’m actually a first-gen, and I’ve never been to Nigeria. So for me, it was very important just to hear from the government in Nigeria, from the ambassador. I have lots of takeaways and it gave me more of a sense of where my family comes from.”

It is hoped that the ambassador’s visit is the start of a great partnership between the university, Smith and Nigeria, and in Itegboje’s words, the opportunity to “build a bridge block by block, internship by internship, start-up by start-up.”