The Board of Trustees of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, (TETFund), has approved an increase of the national research fund from N7.5 billion to the tune of N8.5 billion in 2021.
The board also announced the approval of N5 billion as special intervention to University of Lagos, which will also be captured in the 2021 budget.
Chairman, TETFund Board of Trustees, Alhaji Kashim Imam, disclosed this 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 to UNILAG, which was on the orders of President Muhammadu Buhari, was also carried out in University of Abuja in 2020.
He stressed the importance of research as a prerequisite for national development, adding that no nation can develop without research.
He, however, noted that research was a very delicate balance for TETFund as it is invisible, adding that as a politician, development is counted in terms of physical infrastructures such as raids, bridges, among others.
He further noted that the fund had to strike a balance of funding physical infrastructures on one side, and funding research on the other hand.
“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.
Also speaking, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof Suleiman Bogoro, said the TETFund centres of excellence 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 reassured the centres of the unwavering support of the fund to achieve the laudable objectives of the centres.
While noting that next year, polytechnics will benefit in equal proportion with universities and subsequently colleges of education, he said universities must demonstrate academic leadership in grant writing and avoid complacency.
He decried the poor quality of grant writing among Nigerian academics, stating that the fund has encountered un-readable grant proposals submitted to it.
Earlier, the Director of R&D and TETFund Centres of Excellence, Salihu Bakare, said TETFund’s international profile had risen significantly as other countries like Ghana and Tanzania have come to understudy it and implement their own versions back home.
Bakare said Nigerian universities must cease to be local universities, attract foreign students and compete favourably with any university in the world.
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