By Adedapo Adesanya
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has disclosed that 220 tertiary institutions were given N1.67 trillion between 2010 and 2020.
This was made by the Chairman of TETFund, Mr Kashim Ibrahim-Imam, during the 3rd edition of the Taxpayers Forum in Lagos.
He explained that the money was handed down to public tertiary institutions, including universities, polytechnics and colleges of education across the six geopolitical zones of the country during the period of 10 years.
Giving a breakdown, universities received N732.13 billion, representing 50 per cent of the total amount allocated to tertiary institutions during the period, which comprises 43 federal universities and 43 state-owned universities.
Also, 65 polytechnics received N499.12 billion, while 69 colleges of education received N439.57 billion from the agency in the period under review.
Areas of intervention funded by TETFund annually during the period included physical infrastructure/upgrade, scholarship for academic staff, library development, institution-based research (IBR) and manuscript development.
Others were academic research journals, project maintenance, information technology support, entrepreneurship centres, equipment fabrication and teaching practice.
These also comprised special/designated interventions by TETFund like special high impact intervention, national research fund, disaster recovery and higher education book development fund.
The Chairman said the proactive roles by the monitoring department of TETFund helped to ensure the quality of projects funded and elimination of abandoned projects.
“We have no record of projects funded and abandoned since inception,” he noted.
The Chairman assured that the board of TETFund was set to raise the budget for 2022 to N500 billion from N300 billion approved for 2021 to increase the fund of intervention projects in tertiary institutions.
On his part, the Executive Secretary, TETFund, Mr Suleiman Elias Bogoro, in his presentation, explained that infrastructure received special attention as a result of decay and collapse across public tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
To address the decay, he disclosed that 16,982 various infrastructure projects were funded across the country between January and December 2020.
“Considering the projects carried out since inception, based on annual allocation to institutions over the years (2011-2021), it is estimated that a total of over 152,838 various infrastructure projects have been carried out across various public tertiary institutions,” he said.
These projects according to Mr Bogoro include the construction of lecture theatres, classrooms, hostels, offices, laboratories, road networks and fencing of institutions in different parts of the country.
He disclosed that the Fund sponsored 10,632 lecturers in the local PhD programme and over 9,072 lecturers in the local Masters’ degree programme.
Listing the achievements of TETFund, he said over 4,485 lecturers were sponsored to overseas institutions for PhD programmes and 3,192 for overseas Master’s degree programmes across tertiary institutions.
Others include 98,644 for academic staff training and development programme; 17,121 academic staff for foreign conferences; 4,459 non-academic staff for foreign conferences; 17,410 academic staff sponsored to attend local conferences and 28,660 non-academic staff also were sponsored to attend local conferences/workshops among others.
Modupe Gbadeyanka