Over N400 billion would be set aside by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for higher education institutions in Nigeria by 2024.
Sonny Echono, the fund’s executive secretary, revealed this information yesterday during the Makurdi 2023 review of the fund’s performance.
Echono stated that the team was in Makurdi to review the performance of the fund in 2023 and also take new bearings for what will be done in 2024.
According to him, gathering input from beneficiaries and institutions to utilise in evaluating the different platforms was a crucial part of the retreat.
“We have been collating it to make it part of the issues we will be addressing at this meeting and we also went the extra mile to invite all the beneficiary institution in Benue State and they gave us direct feedbacks on what their impression about what our interventions are and areas they want us to either improve or look at,” he added.
He said the fund was playing a key role in Benue, adding that the state has been a key beneficiary of Tetfund intervention with the additional institutions enlisting of the Polytechnic, Yandev.
“The position of the law is that the funds are for public tertiary institutions – universities, polytechnics and colleges of education owned by either the federal government or states government.
“Those are the limitations we have right now. The agitations are now limited to private institutions, there are so many other tertiary institutions like monotechnics, colleges of agriculture, colleges of cooperatives, research institutes and institutions being run by various other agencies even women affairs have their own institutions, labour studies in Ilorin, they have their own and so on.
“Many of them offer diplomas and even degrees. They also want to benefit from Tetfund. The only way we collaborate with them currently is in the area of research because we know that research is universal and we know that knowledge is collaboration.
“So, we are encouraging them to participate and we actually sponsor people or private individuals who have ideas,” he said