TETFund: Varsities, colleges, polytechnics failed to access N175bn in 6 years –Baffa

THE EXECUTIVE Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), Dr. Abdullahi Bichi Baffa, has revealed that some public universities, colleges of education and polytechnics  failed to access about N175 billion allocated to them in the last six years.
This huge unaccessed fund, according to him, spanned from 2011 to date, despite the hue and cry about inadequate funding to the education sector.
Baffa told Tribune Education that this necessitated the ‘Access Clinic’ currently put in place by the agency to address all the obstacles, to ensure that all the allocations are accessed with dispatch, to meet the required goal. TETFUND had, shortly after announcing the allocation of about N213 billion for the 2017 intervention activities, opened what it called ‘Project Defence and Access Clinic’ for all beneficiary institutions.
The Access Clinic is simply an opportunity for the benefitting institutions to come with all their records concerning allocations, projects, interventions that are outstanding or that they are having difficulty implementing. A discussion is then held with the team from the institution by the management of TETFund in order to come up with a solution for ease of access to the fund.
Baffa said: “When we evaluated our records, we realised that there is about N175 billion of allocations that have been made since 2011 that beneficiary institutions are yet to draw, or have started drawing but yet to close.”
He identified problems hindering speedy access of allocations disbursed by TETFUND to include lack of adequate capacity of some beneficiary institutions, frequent changes of TETFUND desk officers by the management of institutions and activities of unscrupulous contractors who sometimes abandoned the agency’s intervention projects, among others.
He revealed that TETFUND has disbursed N44 billion to beneficiary tertiary institutions for its 2017 intervention in its academic training programmes, and that this was to ensure that institutions were manned by best hands.
“We are projecting that for this year alone, not less than 9,000 scholars are going to be supported to pursue masters and PhD degrees; and by our projection, in the next five years, a minimum of 45,000 scholars are going to be supported by TETFund to obtain masters and PhDs,” he said.




Feel Free To Comments Here...