TETFund plans to diversify interventions in institutions

Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said yesterday that efforts are being made to diversify its intervention to other areas that would ensure expansion of tertiary institutions across the country.
Executive Secretary of the Fund, Dr.
Abdullahi Bichi Baffa, said recently that feelers reaching the management showed that theintroduction of intervention in non-conventional areas of infrastructural development had changed some features in tertiary education management and the system in general.
“We are thinking of going into other areas that would lead to expansion in, not only in the public university, but polytechnic and colleges of education system in the country,” Baffa said.
Already, the Fund, according to Baffa, had introduced what it called ‘Special High Impact’ (SHIP) where selected institutions were beneficiaries.
He disclosed that at present, six polytechnics, six colleges of education and 12 universities had been beneficiaries of the SHIP interventions.
“We are spending about N36 billion on that aside the over N132billion already spent before now, bringing it to over N168billion.
“Quite a number of them have been completed, a number of them I have commissioned already while a number of them are on the queue waiting to be commissioned.
We are pleased with the progress we have made in this aspect of our intervention activity.
“We have sponsored more than 40,000 academic staff for local and international conferences.
For the scholarships, we are very much pleased with the changes that we have brought to the implementation of the TETFund scholarships award.
While commending President Muhammadu Buhari administration’s commitment to revamp tertiary institutions in the country, he said about 8,820 scholars were sponsored for foreign and local conferences as at March, this year.
“These 8,820 scholars are out of a total of 22,000 scholars that TETFund had sponsored since the commencement of the intervention in2008.
We feel that this is a huge success because we think thattraining the teachers in our institutions is the surest way of ensuring quality of higher education in our country

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