The Tertiary Education Trust Fund says it has expenN185billion the training of 35,000 scholars under its Academic Staff training in public tertiary institutions across the country.
Alhaji Abdullahi Imam, Acting Director of Academic Staff Training and Development at TETFund, disclosed this when he received the representatives of the TETFund scholars’ Alumni Steering Committee that paid a courtesy visit to the Executive Secretary of TETFund, will be Arc. Sonny Echono in Abuja on Thursday.
Imam said the scholars were trained both at home and abroad.
According to him, the TETFund Scholarship for Academic Staff commenced in 2008 with the sole aim of training and upscaling the educational capacity of the academic staff of beneficiary institutions.
The project, he said, is the second in expenditure after infrastructural projects of the Fund.
“The training is both locally and foreign, to enable them to conduct and access cutting edge research facilities, quality teaching and learning and global networking,” Imam said.
“It will interest you to know that we have trained about 35,000 scholars so far, and a whopping sum of N185billio was expended in that direction. It is a complete project of the Fund, and it is the second-largest expenditure of the Fund after infrastructure.”
Imam sought the Executive Secretary’s approval to have a TETFund Scholars Alumni to help identify areas of specialisation and pool them into a critical mass of knowledgeable workforce and change agents for the nation’s development.
He stressed that the Alumni, through its planned journals on issues like innovation and entrepreneurship, science, engineering and technology, art, humanities and social science, would help prevent or curtail intellectual flight.
Speaking on the reason for their visit, one of the scholars, Prof. Kinsley Nwozor, stated that they were at TETFund to express appreciation to the Fund for standing by them throughout their studies.
Prof Nwozor noted that though some of them were tempted to stay back after their education, they have decided to return to the nation to prove their mettle and showcase to the world that the dream of TETFund was a well-thought intention.
“No national agency has done what TETfund is doing in Nigeria. An investment of N185 billion is not a chicken change. It is time for us to look at innovative ways of making TETfund stand out,” he said
“You have done so much with gigantic infrastructures in universities. But, we also believe that gigantic structures don’t make gigantic universities but gigantic minds. We are TETfund ambassadors wherever we are, and with you by our side, there is nothing we cannot achieve.”
Responding, the Executive Secretary promised to support the scholars wherever they needed help; the first point would be to develop a database with all the names of the beneficiaries and their areas of specialisation.
“We want to count our blessings even beyond the scholars. You are only a vessel. You are a vehicle through which we achieve our primary aim of improving the quality of teaching and learning in the higher institutions and also promoting research and making the findings of those research touch the lives of our people; translating those research and innovations so that people can consume them, improve their lives and generate income from them,” he said.
