The present, future belong to your generation, AfDB’s Adesina tells young graduands

Group President African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwunmi Adesina has called on young university graduates to sieze the moment and be instruments of change in a world beset by increasing socio-economic challenges.

Delivering the keynote speech at America’s Calvin University Commencement ceremony, Adesina told the audience, including 700 graduates, “The world faces many simultaneous challenges, promising a future of exciting and infinite possibilities, in which you have a role to play,”

Foremost among these challenges are climate change, food insecurity and a lack of universal access to affordable healthcare, he added.

Adesina shared with the graduates the difficult times and conditions he went through as a university student at America’s Purdue University.

During that period, Adesina said, he ran out of the small stipend he had and often had to walk many kilometres, enduring the winter cold, to and from lectures.

“One day a bus driver came to my aid by topping up my transport fare. I also drew the sympathy of my professors, who rallied to pay for  tuition and upkeep.

“Many years later, I won the World Food Prize, the Nobel Prize for Agriculture,” he recalled.

He then enthused, “How could my professors have known at the time that they were helping someone who would later become a World Food Prize laureate?

“How would they have known they were helping someone who would later become president of the African Development Bank Group? In front of me today I see builders and shapers of hope.

“You have been well prepared to go into the world to be the change makers. You have received a world-class education. You have been exposed to great ideas, and you’ve worked alongside faculty and students from all around the world.”

In his remarks, Calvin University’s president Wiebe Boer extolled Adesina’s qualities as “a man of great accomplishments.”

Calling Adesina his mentor, Boer said, “Everywhere he goes, no matter how high, no matter how powerful, no matter how big the checkbook, he never forgets those less fortunate.”

Nain Miranda Duarte, the president of Calvin University’s Student Senate, recounted the economic difficulties his family endured and how he had benefited from people’s generosity from his early days in the slums of Nicaragua to be a graduate from a top American university.