By Felix Khanoba
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) says beneficiary universities under its 2022 direct intervention will receive a total sum of N642,848,138 each.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Mr Sonny Echono, made this known at a strategic interactive session for heads of beneficiary institutions on Monday in Abuja.
Echono also revealed that the Fund would also disburse N396,780,086 to each beneficiary polytechnic with N447,758,804 going to each college of education.
While commending President Muhammadu Buhari for approving guidelines of 2022 intervention budget for implementation, the TETFund boss noted that the broad areas of interventions as approved by the Board of Trustees of the Fund were categorised into Annual Direct Intervention and Special Interventions.
“It is my pleasure to inform you that in line with the provisions of the Act we have received the approval of Mr. President for the guidelines of the Year 2022 intervention budget for implementation.
“Disbursement for the annual direct intervention for 2022 approved guidelines are summarised as follows: N642,848,138 to each university; N396,780,086 to each polytechnic; and N447,758,804 to each college of education, ” Echono said.
The executive secretary, who assured the beneficiary institutions of receiving their letters of allocation for the annual direct intervention at the interactive session, added that allocations for special interventions would be released in due course.
On ensuring that the Fund carried out its mandate effectively, Echono promised to build on the efforts of his predecessors, adding that digitalisation of theses, improvement on intervention in the area of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), among others, have continued to receive major attention in the drive to boost content based intervention.
His words : “In line with the Funds paradigm shift to content based intervention and the resolution to deepen Research and Development the fund introduced the train the trainer capacity building of academics on research proposal writing and research grant management skills, which is expected to have trained a total of 1,761 academics by July 2022.
“It is believed that those that have gained the training was now begin to train other academics locally and as such the programme will be stepped down in Year 2022 and 2023 before close-out.
” We also propose to refocus the entrepreneurship intervention line for universities to meet best global practice of entrepreneurship development and training.
” The present focus on provision of entrepreneurship centers and procurement of facilities and equipment, will be refocused to incorporate soft skills and initiatives in producing entrepreneurs and innovators
” The TETFund Centers of Excellence have all been allocated funds but are yet to commence their proposed work plans despite the capacity building workshops that had been organized for the Heads and Directors of all the centers on the establishment operations, and administration of the centers as well the ‘Strategic Framework and Establishment Guideline developed by TETFund for the centers. hence the need to take a critical look at the implementation plan for the centers.
“To give further impetus to our TETFund Scholarship for Academic Staff (TSAS), we recently signed an MOU with the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) and a consortium of nearly 40 Universities in Brazil to provide world-class, multi-disciplinary, tuition free masters and PhD degree programmes for our scholars.
“This will dramatically increase the contribution of the sector to national food. security, science and technology driven innovation as well as entrepreneurship and employability of Nigerian graduates. A similar MOU is at negotiation stage with another institution in France that would be of immense benefit to our institutions and the nation.”
The AUTHORITY reports that the interactive session which had its theme as “Ensuring Synergy for Effective Implementation of TETFund Interventions”, also attracted Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Education, Executive Secretaries of National Universities Commission, National Council for Colleges of Education, among others.
