The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has frowned at the ongoing strike embarked upon by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).
TETFund said it has since 2016 increased funding for tertiary institutions in Nigeria by threefold to enable the institutions become world class in standard and to improve their global ranking.
He noted that the ongoing strike was unnecessary and uncalled for.
The executive secretary of the Fund, Dr Abdullahi Baffa, who stated this yesterday during a sensitisation workshop at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) headquarters in Abuja.
Baffa said, “There is no need for the strike because based on the sharing formulae enshrined in section 7(3) of the TETFund Act, the distribution of funds are in the ratio of 2:1:1 as between universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
“Therefore, for the 2016 interventions, universities received N1.009 billion, Polytechnics N 691.63 million and Colleges of Education N679 million as opposed to universities N337 million, polytechnics N250 million and Colleges of Education N227 million in 2015”.
According to Baffa, TETFund recently embarked on an access clinic and project proposal defence by beneficiary institutions, which was aimed at discussing, diagnosing and resolving all the difficulties impeding access to Fund’s interventions.
“It was observed that most of the institutions were not conversant with our guidelines or aware of the existence of some of our intervention lines, thereby leading to poor access to our intervention funds”, he said.
He noted that TETFund has success in its areas of mandate through the provision and improvement of the physical infrastructure in all its 202 benefiting institutions from 2011 to date as its jets litter all the campuses of Nigerian’s public tertiary institutions.
He said, “In 2011, the Fund launched the National Research Fund (NRF) with a seed fund of N3billion to support cutting edge research in areas of critical national need and development. So far, a total of N1.7billion has been accessed by lecturers to finance their research activities.
“TETFund also allocates funds on annual basis to institutions for their Institution-Based Research (IBR) for research projects that are not more than N2 million per project.
“Remarkable progress has been made in the area of academic staff training and development. As at May 207, a total of 17, 482 have been sponsored by TETFund for Masters and Ph.D courses in top ranked universities both in Nigeria and overseas”.
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