The Tertiary Education Trust Fund said it had invested N12bn in the training of researchers across 12 universities in the year 2021 as part of its mandate of funding the educational sector in the country.
The Chairman, Board of Trustees of TETFUND, Kashim Imam, made this disclosure on Monday in Maiduguri during an interactive forum with the theme, ‘Improving Education Tax collection in the post-pandemic era’, which was organised to improve Education Tax remittance through the Federal Inland Revenue Service.
In his welcome address, Kashim stated that TETFUND had ongoing projects in 226 higher institutions out of the 245 in the country.
Some of the projects, including laboratories, engineering workshops, lecture theatres and lecture halls, among others, are among the 100,000 projects being undertaken with the 2021 intervention fund.
Kashim noted, “There are 226 higher institutions where we are undertaking 100,000 projects from the 2021 intervention fund of TETFUND. These projects are funded from the revenue we generated in the year 2021.
“We had a revenue target of N500bn, but we could only realise N200bn, which we are using to fund these projects in Nigerian universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
“Borno State alone has seven tertiary institutions and we have projects ongoing in these seven institutions, including the newly established Federal Polytechnic, Monguno, which we gave a take-off grant of N2bn.
“Apart from infrastructure and physical projects, we also sponsor academics and fund research works. As of the year 2021, we invested N12bn to fund research in 12 universities, amounting to N1bn per university.
“We have also given scholarships to lecturers to further their studies for Master’s and PhD programmes, but we have resolved as an agency and duly informed the vice-chancellors of the universities that it does not make sense to spend money training lecturers abroad when we can use that money to better our education institutions.
“So, we only send lecturers abroad for studies when their specialities are not available in Nigerian universities or where they are on unique specialities.”
The Coordinating Director Tax Operating Group, FIRS, Kabir Abba, said the agency had devised new strategies to improve tax collection of TETFUND, and that the service would ensure that all taxable companies and contractors remit their taxes before being considered for award of contracts in any of the tertiary institutions across the country.
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