TETFund approves N8.5bn research fund
for institutions
By
Uji Abdullahi Iliyasu
Abuja
THE
Board of Trustees of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has given an
approval to increase the national research fund from N7.5bn to N8.5bn in the
coming year in order for the Fund to encourage the undertaking of cutting-edge
research in the country.
Also,
the federal government has approved the sum of N5bn as special intervention to
the University of Lagos (UniLag) to be captured in the 2021 budget.
Chairman, Board of Trustees (BoT) of TETFund, Alhaji Kashim Imam, made this known Thursday in Abuja at a two-day capacity
building workshop for heads of beneficiary institutions and staff of TETFund
centres of excellence in Abuja.
Imam
said the intervention for UniLag, as directed by President Muhammadu Buhari,
was also carried out in the University of Abuja in 2020.
Stressing
the importance of research as a vehicle for national development, he said that
no nation can develop without research.
He
further noted that the Fund has to trade off funding physical
infrastructure in order to focus on
research funding.
He
announced that TETFund would add another 12 centres of excellence in 2021 and
allocate One Billion Naira to each.
“Six
state universities and six polytechnics will be added to the centres of
excellence next year, and 70 per cent of the funds will be for research
funding,” he said.
Executive
Secretary of TETFund, Professor Suleiman Elias Bogoro, said the TETFund centres
of excellence ( TCOE) project is, at the first instance, a zonal tertiary
education project designed to promote specialisation among participating
universities within the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, (STEM),
Agriculture and Health areas, among others.
Bogoro
said the project was geared towards addressing identified national development
challenges, as well as strengthening the capacities of the selected
universities to deliver high quality training and applied research.
“Within
the five-year gestation period of the TCOE project, we await success stories
and manifest achievements that will stretch the limits of our expectations.
“The
R&D and innovation flame has been ignited in Nigeria, thanks to our modest
efforts, but the future of this initiative and the possibility of the R&D
flame developing into a raging inferno that transforms the research landscape
in Nigeria rests squarely on your shoulders,” Bogoro declared.