By Usman M. Aliyu
The Board of Trustees of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has given 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.