We’ll empower Nigerians with skills in air-conditioning and refrigeration – Minister

The Federal Ministry of Environment has expressed its commitment to training and retraining Nigerians to acquire the necessary skills in air conditioning and refrigeration.

Dr. Iziaq Adekunle Salako, Minister of State, Federal Ministry of Environment, said this at the handover ceremony of refrigeration and air-conditioning servicing equipment and tools to training centres on Friday in Lagos.

Supreme News reports that the exercise was carried out under the Hydrochlorofluorocarbons Phase-out Management Plan (HPMP).

Salako said he felt accomplished to supervise a critical leg of the HPMP project, which was the hand over of refrigeration/air-conditioning servicing equipment and tools to the first batch of HPMP certified training centres in Nigeria.

He said the equipment and tools were procured under the HPMP being implemented by the Federal Ministry of Environment in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the Government of Italy.

“The endpoint of this project is to completely eliminate Nigeria’s 2010 baseline consumption of 344.9 tonnes of HCFCs by 2040,” Salako said.

He noted that over the years, the refrigeration and air-conditioning service sector in Nigeria has remained largely unstructured, with a large presence of informal, small, and medium-scale practitioners and little or no presence of qualified engineers.

“The technical capacity of technicians in the sector, therefore, remained very low and inadequate to drive the total HCFCs phase-out plan of the country.

“To address this challenge, one of the major activities proposed by my ministry and approved for implementation under the HPMP Stage 2 in 2018 is the establishment of Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Centres of Excellence,” he said.

He explained that this would be through strengthening of existing training centres to provide best practices, using non-ozone depleting and low global warming refrigerants as well as improving energy efficiency of cooling appliances.

“Consequently, in July 2023, 32 technicians were sent to Italy by the Federal Ministry of Environment in collaboration with UNDP.

“These technicians received training and certification at an Italian company on using hydrocarbon refrigerants and improving energy efficiency in the servicing sector.

“The graduants will be operating training centres across the country and are expected to train and certify over the next few years not less than 10,000 technicians on good refrigeration practices using hydrocarbon refrigerants,” he said.

According to him, the Federal Ministry of Environment is currently updating the curriculum to be used for the training and certification programme.

“In addition, necessary policies and minimum standards to ensure that only trained and certified technicians are allowed to practice refrigeration and air-conditioning servicing in the country will soon be made public and will be strictly enforced,” Salako said.

Some of the equipment handed over to the training centres included refrigeration handling tools such as service manifolds, electronic gauges, and vacuum gauges.

Others are: tubing tools such as tube cutters and pinch-off pliers; safety equipment including safety glasses and gloves, and hydrocarbon service tools such as nitrogen flushing equipment, HC leak detectors, HC charging equipment, etc.

There was also equipment for recycling, such as portable recycling machines, external filter kits and burn-out outfilter accessories.

The minister told the beneficiaries that the sustainable deployment of the equipment was a major priority.

“Hence we will be carrying out robust monitoring of your activities in partnership with a private sector company, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria and your trade association, the Nigerian Association of Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Practitioners.

“It is my believe that with this handover, your centres will be better equipped to conduct the training, assessment and certification of technicians on the latest trends in the refrigeration and air conditioning sector.

“I implore you to utilise the equipment effectively and abide by all the conditions outlined by the Ministry.

“This is an ongoing intervention and very soon additional training centres will be recruited into the programme,” Salaki said.

He expressed gratitude to UNDP, UNIDO and the government of Italy for their support and the successful implementation of the Nigeria HPMP project.

“I want to assure you that the huge investment that has gone into this programme will be jealously protected to ensure that the 2040 targets of Nigeria with respect to the Montreal Protocol is achieved,” Salako added.

In her goodwill message, the UNDP Resident Representative, Mrs Elsie Attafuah, expressed excitement on behalf of the UNDP and by extension the United Nations family in Nigeria to be part of the handing over ceremony.

Attafuah noted that the development agencies facilitated the transfer of refrigeration, air conditioning training equipment and tools to two master training centres, under the hydrofluorocarbons phase out management plans and also started upgrading 16 existing training centres nationwide.

She thanked the minister for his commitment to seeing to the success of the project.

In his goodwill message, the founder of Cool Plus Ltd., one of the training centres, Mr Ade Awujoola, said the challenge before him was to give back to Nigeria what the country had given to him.

Awujoola said the climate crisis and depletion of the ozone layer were issues that concerned everybody, every human being.

According to him, the challenge over the years is the inability to raise a dynamic, smart and skilled workforce, to be able to help in addressing the climate crisis so that the environment can be more sustainable.

He expressed gratitude to the federal ministry of environment and the development partners in the training of the needed manpower to change the narrative of air-conditioning and refrigeration in Nigeria.

A representative of one of the centres, Florence Aluko, of Government Technical College, Agidingbi, said the training would equip technicians with the skills to use ozone friendly gas in the air-conditioning and refrigeration systems.