Tag: TETFUND

The Coordinator of Vanguard for Credible Representation (VCR), an Abuja-based civil society group, Comrade Akinloye Oyeniyi, has praised the management of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), over the support provided to bail out 1,500 Nigerian scholars studying abroad under the Fund’s academic training programme.

 Oyeniyi while speaking during an education forum meeting in Abuja, expressed delight hearing the news that the scholars hitherto struggling with the effect of the current exchange rate of the naira have been bailed out.

 The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc Sonny Echono, has made this known during a recent oversight visit to the Fund by the House of Representatives Committee on Tertiary Education Trust Fund. Recall that the high exchange rate caused some challenges for TETFund-sponsored scholars making many of them to request for extra funding as their studies were threatened with stoppage by the institutions in which they were studying.

Read Also: Minimum wage: Committee adjourns to allow Finance Minister meet deadline

 In his remarks, Oyeniyi said the unfortunate issue would have resulted in a drop in the number of beneficiaries of the Fund’s academic training programme in foreign institutions and praised the government for rising to the occasion through TETFUND. While saying that the remittances process for scholars in the past was not that good, as many institutions do come back to TETFund expressing concerns over the payment system, he remarked that now the Fund, under Echono, pays directly to the institutions as part of management’s intervention while CBN now transfers in bulk to different foreign institutions of those scholars.

 “We, in the group can authoritatively tell you all, that TETFund is no more the Fund you know before. Under the current Executive Secretary, any project to be executed by the Fund are now being planned, packaged and selected by the beneficiary institutions for review and concurrence of the Fund. Nothing like TETFund or vendor-promoted projects anymore. It is what is needed now that is provided, and that is commendable”, Oyeniyi remarked.

‘’The Fund was also aplauded for partnering with the Brazilian Government and Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), for agri-economics research, this will no doubt assist the country as regards food security and improved nutrition”, the group said.

Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETfund), Sunny Echono, has said the agency will deliver on its mandate of bridging funding gap and provide infrastructure in institutions after reforms.

Echono, recipient of Outstanding Public Servant of the Year, spoke at the event in Lagos.

He said: “Since we came on board, we have embarked on reforms to make the agency work better. We are aware of the role TETFund plays in provision of infrastructure and facilities in our institutions, as well as training of academic and non-academic staff.

” We are glad testimonies from beneficiaries – schools and individuals, are positive and encouraging…

“Of course, the magnitude of and nature of reforms implemented are going to affect some people adversely. We expect such people not to be comfortable…”

Read Also: Academic training programme: TETFund spends N3.8bn on 1,500 scholars abroad

He noted the award  would spur him and his team to work harder and achieve more.

On whether the agency is not being stressed by number of institutions it caters for, Echono said TETfund is committed to catering to institutions with numbers increasing.

“More institutions are set up that need us, but we are up to the task. We have the arrangement to take care of them…’’

For instance, if a state has more than one university, we alternate our commitment among them. If we take care of A today, tomorrow, it will be the turn of B,” he added.

 He  noted that no projects embarked upon by the fund would be abandoned, adding that efforts would be made to complete them promptly.

About N3.8billion has been spent on 1,500 Nigerian scholars studying abroad, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has said.

The agency said the disbursement was done under its academic training programme as a bailout fund to cushion the effect of the current exchange rate of the naira.

The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, made this known during an oversight visit to the agency by the House of Representatives Committee on Tertiary Education Trust Fund on Thursday in Abuja.

He said the high exchange rate caused some challenges for TETFund-sponsored scholars, as many of them requested extra funding, adding that the issue has also resulted in a drop in the number of beneficiaries of TETFund’s academic training programmes in foreign institutions.

While saying that the remittances process for scholars in the past was not that good, Echono said many of the institutions came back to TETFund expressing concerns over the payment system.

Echono said: “But we now pay directly to the institution as part of our intervention. So CBN now transfers in bulk to different institutions for those scholars.

“We have taken care of 1500 scholars with a total of N3.8 billion expended. We identify a cut-off point for those who will be eligible for the scholarship.”

The TETFund boss, who commended the Miriam Onuoha-led Reps’ Committee, also reeled out various projects and interventions of the agency that are fast making positive impacts in the country.

Read Also: Soldier killed in home state Abia after surviving five years fight against terrorists

He lavished praise on the committee for its support, which has seen a rise in education tax collection from 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent.

He said the collection from education tax in 2020 was N257 billion, and by 2021, TETFund received a sharp decline in the tax collection of N185.5 billion.

He added that the collection rose to N328.8 billion in 2022 and N725 billion in 2023, respectively.

On the issue of attracting foreign grants for cutting-edge research, Echono said before now, Nigeria was not doing well, adding that through the efforts of TETFund, the story has now changed, as it moved from 9th position to 7th in Africa in terms of countries that attract the highest research grants on the continent.

Chairman of the committee, Miriam Onuoha, lauded Echono for the manner in which he has meticulously executed projects and other interventions in line with the mandate of the TETFund.

To boost research in the country, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has provided funding support for over 5,525 physical infrastructural projects.

According to the agency, the funding support also extended to over 576 faculty/departmental libraries in tertiary institutions across the country.

Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono announced this while presenting a paper at the 26th seminar of Nigerian Academy of Education in Abuja on Wednesday.

Speaking on the paper: “Funding of Tertiary Education in Nigeria,” Echono said the agency has awarded grants for 19,297 Institution Based Research (IBR) projects and 912 research projects under the National Research Fund (NRF).

The project, he said, was designed to support impactful research which will contribute to national developmental efforts as well as tackle global challenges.

Echono said the agency also sponsored and supported several research and innovation initiatives such as Research for Impact (R4i), TETFund Alliance for Innovative Research (TETFAIR), and the Innovation Fellowship for Aspiring Inventors and Researchers (i-FAIR) programmes, all targeted at deepening impactful research and uptake of research outcomes with potentials for commercialization as panacea to societal problems.

He said: “In addition, TETFund has funded the procurement of 3,099,871 library books in beneficiary institutions. The Fund has also sponsored the publication of 845 titled Academic Research Journals projects, and the development of 2,307 Academic Manuscripts to Books.

“In the area of capacity building, TETFund has sponsored 23,271 academic staff of public tertiary institutions for PhD programmes. Out of this, 4,598 were sponsored to foreign institutions, while 18,673 attended institutions within Nigeria.

“Likewise, 15,977 academic staff were sponsored for the Masters degree programme. 3,525 were in foreign institutions, while 12,452 undertook their studies in local institutions within the country. In addition, 911 scholars were sponsored for Benchwork in foreign institutions and 872 academic staff for Post-Doctoral programmes specially targeted at strengthening scientific research capacity of the country.

“Also, 31,071 academic staff of tertiary institutions were sponsored to attend international conferences in foreign countries, while 46,604 were sponsored for local conferences, bringing the total scholars sponsored for academic conferences to 77,675. Furthermore, 110,432 academic staff of colleges of education were sponsored to conduct supervision of teaching practice across the country.”

Echono said the interventions to tertiary institutions and other steps taken by the government have enabled Nigeria to be ranked as one of the six most improved countries in Time Higher Education Rankings between 2021 -2022.

He lamented that despite all these laudable efforts, there was still a huge gap that needed to be covered, particularly in the area of funding to enable the government to provide the much-needed quality tertiary education to its citizenry.

Echono emphasised the need to encourage and support tertiary institutions to seek for alternative and additional revenue sources by developing a range of pathways and mechanisms, including ventures related to their core business of education delivery, research and services such as clinical medical facilities, ICT, vocational and enterprise centres/innovations hubs, that would be self-financing to generate surplus to the institution and similar initiatives.

This is just as he said tertiary institutions should, as a matter of policy, explore partnerships and collaboration with funding agencies and development partners both at home and abroad to attract support and complementary resources to support the institutions.

He added: “The institutions should make conscious efforts to strengthen their R&D activities, and ensure effective linkage and collaboration with industry towards the commercialisation of their research output to generate revenue and sustain the system. They should design specialised programmes tailored to deepen their relevance/impact on their immediate communities to attract patronage and support.

“Each institution should be encouraged and supported to establish a functional Business Development Office to support fund-raising and pursue knowledge intensive business opportunities as well as opportunities for research grant funding. These should feature not only in the ranking of institutions but also in the promotion prospects of facility members.

“Institutions should devise innovative ways of engaging in entrepreneurship initiatives and explore commercial opportunities in activities related with the institution and community investment to generate revenues to guarantee self-sufficiency.”

Over 2.5 million students have been enrolled in the Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services (TERAS) platform, Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) Sonny Echono has said.

The TETFund boss disclosed that the platform has excess capacity but public institutions are given the preference of onboarding first before it is extended to private universities.

He said this during the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities, ARNU, with the theme: “Sustainable Legal Framework as Panacea for Industrial Harmony in the Nigerian University System: Challenges and Remedies.”

The TETFund boss said the agency has enlisted the support of registrars of tertiary institutions and other stakeholders to ensure maximum utilisation of the ICT infrastructure for administrative, research and other purposes by students and staff of their institutions.

Read Also: Lagos CP Adegoke Fayoade: I chose police job above university lecturer

Echono said: “And in fact I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend it to private universities, because they are Nigerian students, but we want to give them the opportunity first to finish onboarding their students.

“Currently we have about 2.4 or 2.5 million students enrolled. But my biggest concern, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability. People are enrolled, we are interested in the usage, how many students are using all these facilities?

TERAS was launched by TETFund in 2023 to provide a “centralised hub for tertiary education services, fostering collaboration, efficiency, and innovation by providing a wide range of capabilities and functionalities for tertiary education institutions, students, researchers, and the entire education ecosystem.

“We put resources on the platform so at the moment it has an overlay of an identity management system, we call it beneficiary identity management, BIMS, and once you are registered on BIMS it gives you access at no cost to all these learning resources, whether it is all the 4,000 libraries that are available.

“The open learning resources, whether it’s the anti plagiarism checker that will enable you to check your assignments and your thesis and all that. But they are all on this board and the Blackboard learning platform is very useful for our registrars too in terms of administration and the governance of the institutions.”

Echono said TETFund was to connect all National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) study Centres nationwide with ICT fibre infrastructure to improve access to resources by all students.

While stating that the resources were not only for students, he noted that registrars of tertiary institutions play a very key role because they are the custodians of records, adding that TETFund has been engaging with them to ensure maximum utilisation of the ICT infrastructure for administrative purposes.

National Chairman of Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU), Ife Oluwale said the workshop was to help registrars of universities hone their skills and be abreast with current trends in university administration globally.

Over 2.5 million students have been enrolled in the Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services (TERAS) platform, Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) Sonny Echono has said.

The TETFund boss disclosed that the platform has excess capacity but public institutions are given the preference of onboarding first before it is extended to private universities.

He said this during the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities, ARNU, with the theme: “Sustainable Legal Framework as Panacea for Industrial Harmony in the Nigerian University System: Challenges and Remedies.”

The TETFund boss said the agency has enlisted the support of registrars of tertiary institutions and other stakeholders to ensure maximum utilisation of the ICT infrastructure for administrative, research and other purposes by students and staff of their institutions.

Echono said: “And in fact I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend it to private universities, because they are Nigerian students, but we want to give them the opportunity first to finish onboarding their students.

“Currently we have about 2.4 or 2.5 million students enrolled. But my biggest concern, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability. People are enrolled, we are interested in the usage, how many students are using all these facilities?

TERAS was launched by TETFund in 2023 to provide a “centralised hub for tertiary education services, fostering collaboration, efficiency, and innovation by providing a wide range of capabilities and functionalities for tertiary education institutions, students, researchers, and the entire education ecosystem.

“We put resources on the platform so at the moment it has an overlay of an identity management system, we call it beneficiary identity management, BIMS, and once you are registered on BIMS it gives you access at no cost to all these learning resources, whether it is all the 4,000 libraries that are available.

“The open learning resources, whether it’s the anti plagiarism checker that will enable you to check your assignments and your thesis and all that. But they are all on this board and the Blackboard learning platform very useful for our registrars too in terms of administration and the governance of the institutions.”

Echono said TETFund was to connect all National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) study Centres nationwide with ICT fibre infrastructure to improve access to resources by all students.

While stating that the resources were not only for students, he noted that registrars of tertiary institutions play a very key role because they are the custodians of records, adding that TETFund has been engaging with them to ensure maximum utilisation of the ICT infrastructure for administrative purpose.

He stressed the importance of data in the school system and said data has however been a big issue in Nigeria’s educational system as even in the tertiary institutions the country has not been able to do a lot about it but that has been prioritised by the present administration.

Echono said: “That our educational data should be credible, should be up-to-date and it should be available in a ubiquitous manner for people to be able to access because you can’t plan effectively if you don’t have credible accurate data.

“And that data is being dumped through ICT; so, we are working with registrars to ensure that.

“So, if you just click by the time you go on to our BIMS for example, you see a student’s record, everything about that student will pop up and you will know when he was enrolled, what course he did in school; such records we must have for effective national planning.

“A lot of lectures are actually utilising it already because in real time from our office, I can see how many students are on it at this particular point in time, how many lecturers are using it for lesson notes and it makes education a lot easier.”

National Chairman of Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU), Ife Oluwale said the workshop was to help registrars of universities hone their skills and be abreast with current trends in university administration globally.

Oluwale said the association was committed to the capacity development of its members and believed that a trained staff was an invaluable asset to any organisation.

Oluwale said: “They bring not only expertise but also efficiency and a higher standard of quality to their work. They can navigate challenges more effectively, adapt to new situations with ease, and in the long run contribute significantly to the overall success of the organisation.

Oluwale, who is also the Registrar of Ekiti State University, appealed to proprietors of universities and other agencies of government to show better commitment to the training of registrars and other personnel, while commending the efforts of TETFund in that regard.

The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has said part of the reforms it carried out was to eliminate the use of vendors and contracts in its academic and professional staff training interventions.

The agency said contracts were no longer used for its content-based interventions except in infrastructural projects where the procurement of goods, tools, laboratory equipment and others are needed.

Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, stated this during an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU) in Abuja.

Echono’s response came on the heels of allegations by an online news medium that TETFund awarded N7.6 billion questionable contracts within two months, alleging that the agency acted outside its mandate in carrying out capacity building programmes in its beneficiary institutions.

But the TETFund boss took time to explain that the agency has been leveraging on Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) to carry out its academic and professional staff training since 2016.

Echono said: “We do not use contracts, we have eliminated the use of vendors; we do serious academic and professional training.

“We sponsor people for postdoc, for bench work, or even academic degrees: masters and PhDs, and for professionals proficiencies and certification in ICT that will improve employability.

“So when detractors try to say things like these, they’re calling it contracts, because they are trying to criminalise when they knew for example, that contracts you cannot pay more than 30% as advanced payments.”

He said in one of the MoUs reached recently with CAMPUS France, which controls about 29 universities, slashed the cost of tuition for Nigerian scholars by 20 per cent.

He said before now, Nigerian institutions that were patronising other institutions, were paying regular fees, but now it has been reduced by 20 per cent, adding that these MoUs were saving billions for Nigeria.

Echono added that in the case of Federation of African Research Association (FARA) in Brazil, Nigeria had 100 scholars and that the MoU was initially only on agriculture; but that he expanded it, and there are now 48 institutions involved instead of the initial 18 and all the scholars from Nigeria were now getting free tuition.

He said the agency has received over 800 applications for the 150 spaces provided for Nigeria because it is cheaper to train with that.

Echono said: “We through this process of negotiation also in compliance with our own laws, are the ones that said please we can only give you 85% because there is a requirement for us to show evidence of performance of monitoring before we release the final 15%, which is what we were able to negotiate.

“We have removed all these middlemen; people are not happy but I am sorry, that is the job I was asked to come and do; we have removed the wheeling and dealing and have been able to restore the image of our institutions, and we are proud of that achievement.”

On the procurement of blackboards, he said the agency had MoU with an American company which made the purchase of the boards cheaper, adding that individual institutions keyed into the project and paid for the boards to eliminate cost.

He stated: “Rather than dealing with vendors who do not have capacity because these issues are intellectual property rights; they are also issues related to tuition. So we don’t discuss contracts when we’re talking about academic training and professional training.

“What is applicable are the fees, the tuition fees that people pay per student; and when you add all the costs for all these schools, you now get N7.6 billion. It sounds alarming, but the reality is that the vote for this for each school, each polytechnic and college of education is N25 million.

“The highest is for the university and that is N50 million and we are able to make over 60% savings on this if we had gone to a contract route because we went straight to the owners of the copyright.

“We went straight rather than using their agents because the agents can only give you discounts on the commission they get from the owners of the copyright, but given the type of volume that we’re bringing, we gave all the leverage to be able to negotiate.

“And these are done by experts on our behalf who have been able to track records that do this and all the schools were in agreement.”

Read Also: Ibadan Poly shines at Tetfund creative writing, research event

Echono further explained that “There is a fundamental difference between the various types of interventions where we prefer to do infrastructure projects, where we are procuring goods or equipment, tools, laboratory equipment, or whatever when we are procuring consultancy services, we use the contract system because that is the most suitable way of getting those services.

“But for the content component of our interventions, and that includes the research, and our academic and professional staff training, we do not use contracts; we have eliminated the use of vendors.

“These are the opportunities we are offering to our students and our academics. For these, we have always adopted memoranda of agreement, MOUs and the difference is very clear, contracts are always geared towards profit. Everybody knows that the contract system was part of the image problems I was forced to clear as part of my reforms in TETFund.”