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

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

He said the areas of interventions as approved by the Board of Trustees of the Fund were categorised into yearly direct intervention and special interventions.

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

The Executive Secretary said for special direct disbursement, the Fund would increase the allocation and number of beneficiary institutions for the Special High Impact Programme (SHIP), provide hostels for selected beneficiary institutions, as well as sustain 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 current administrations to three per cent of accessible profit and other factors diligently implemented by the FIRS in collaboration with the Fund. We call upon the FIRS to sustain and improve the growth of the collection to enable us to deliver on the President’s promise to Nigerian people and the improvement of the 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 members of staff training and development, as well as manuscript and book development in our institutions,” he said.

He said that disbursement of the money would be done in three parts: universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.

In their separate remarks, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, Andrew Adejo; Executive Secretary, National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Prof. Idris Bugaje and his counterpart in National Commission for Colleges of Education, Prof. Paulinus Chijioke, stressed the need for synergy to enable TETFUND to deliver on its mandate.