The Executive Secretary, Tertiary Education Trust Fund, (TETFund), Sonny Echono, has announced a direct intervention in public tertiary institutions for the year 2024.

At an interactive session with heads of over 200 beneficiary institutions yesterday in Abuja, Echono said the meeting was called to get their input into the draft disbursement guidelines for tertiary institutions for next year’s intervention cycle.

He noted that the areas of interventions as approved by the Board of Trustees of the Fund were categorised into Annual Direct Intervention and Special Interventions.

He listed proposed areas of focus under the annual direct disbursements to include the creation of career centres for all categories of beneficiary institutions and institution-based skills development for Polytechnics.

For Special Direct Disbursement, the Executive Secretary said the Fund would increase the allocation and number of beneficiary institutions for the Special High Impact Programme (SHIP), provide hostels for selected beneficiary institutions we well as sustained provision for disaster recovery, security infrastructure, research funding, central multipurpose laboratories, agricultural laboratories/farms among others.

“I am pleased to inform you that the collection of the Year 2023 Education tax, which we are allocating for the 2024 intervention projects is the highest collection to date.

“This no doubt is due to the increases approved by the former and present administrations to 3% of accessible profit and other factors diligently implemented by the FIRS in collaboration with the Fund.

We sincerely hope and call upon the FIRS to sustain and improve the growth of the collection to enable us deliver on Mr. President’s promise to the Nigerian people and the improvement of our tertiary education sector for greater competitiveness and national development.

“We have dedicated time and resources to address various issues affecting our interventions as identified in last year’s stakeholders meeting, and we have made significant progress in this regard.

“We have also achieved substantial improvements in our interventions concerning research and innovation, academic staff training and development, as well as manuscript and book development in our institutions.”
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