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 N8.5 billion in 2021 in line with the efforts of the agency to encourage conduct of cutting edge research in the country.
The Federal Government through the fund has also approved the sum of N5 billion as special intervention to the University of Lagos to be captured in the 2021 budget.
Chairman, TETFund Board of Trustees, Alhaji Kashim Imam, made this known on Thursday in Abuja at a two-day capacity building workshop for heads of beneficiary institutions and staff of TETFund centres of excellence.
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 further noted that the fund has to strike a balance of funding physical infrastructures on one side, and funding research on the other hand.
He announced that TETFund will add another 12 centres of excellence next year and allocate N1 billion to each.
“Six state universities and six polytechnics will be aded to the centres of excellence next year, and 70 per cent of the funds will be for research funding,” he said.
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Executive Secretary of TETFund, Professor 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 said the project is geared towards addressing identified national development challenges, as well as strengthening the capacities of beneficiary 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,” he said.
UNILAG gets N5bn special intervention as TETFund okays N8.5bn research fund for institutions
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