The Campus and its Community
Host Community: Ondo
The university is located in Ondo Town, Ondo State, South-West of Nigeria. The main campus site of the University at Liyetu is located about 8km from the center of Ondo Town. Ondo region lies within latitude 07º 4′W and longitude 04º 8′E. The town is about 30km South of Akure, the Ondo State Capital.
In South – West Nigeria, people of Ondo are well known for their love for and interest in education, and have a very rich history and culture.
The Ondo people’s love for and interest in education and development is quite evident in their full acceptance, contributions and support for siting the Wesley University of Science and Technology in their domain. In this regard, the community, which has very little Methodist presence, through the immediate past (late) Osemawe of Ondo, Oba (Dr.) Festus Ibidapo Adedinsewo Adesanoye, CFR, JP donated 11 hectares of land and some buildings for the take-off campus and 221 hectares of virgin land for the permanent site.
Being an agrarian society with great natural endowments in bitumen, oil, forestry resources and agricultural products, siting of WUSTO in Ondo will impact greatly on the community. The university would meet the aspirations of the community along the line of education that will meet the yearnings of the 21st Century in cutting-edge technological advancement. Specifically, there would be:
a) Academic benefit to the people: By virtue of proximity, opportunity for higher education is made available to prospective candidates in the immediate community.
b) The university will relies on the immediate community for services such as skilled and unskilled labour, provision of goods and transportation. Consequently, location of the university is a major boost to the economy and development of the community.
c) Housing: The University, in its infancy, is not be able to provide all the housing needs of the staff and is relying on the properties provided by indigenes to meet its housing requirements. In this respect, the local landlords will feel the impact of the university as houses, which hitherto were unoccupied and unused would be put to good use.
d) In the area of research, a major blessing of locating the university in Ondo is the immense opportunity of research into local endowments for improved output. The area is blessed with oil, bitumen, forestry resources and agricultural products. The environment provides a good springboard for raw material research for industries. Just a few kilometers down the road the road is the Engineering Materials and Development Institute (Akure), one of the four of such centres in the whole of Nigeria. Clearly, the opportunities for collaborative research and exchange of personnel in this area is enormous
