The Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Suleiman Bogoro has decried that the execution and presentation of low quality projects by beneficiary institutions for commissioning has been a worrying trend.
The ES said another worrying trend confronting the Fund is the growing number of institutions that are being established just to meet TETFund requirement so as to benefit from interventions.
Bogoro said this while innaugurating the first ever expanded Technical Advisory Committee on Impact Asessment (TACIA) to embark on evaluation and scrutiny of the Fund on Wednesday in Abuja
“There are a number of issues confronting the the Fund, the uncomfortable development is the tendencies of a number of institutions being established just to meet TETFund requirement for enlisting to benefit. It’s very disturbing and we are hoping that with further consultations, some policies may emerge to minimize the emergence of these institutions”, he said.
Bogoro added, “The quality of projects being presented for commissioning by some of these institutions are of very low quality. Recently, I was called to commission a project that took so many years to execute, but i will not mention the university and when I got there it’s as if mucus hace covered the building and they were blaming the contractors.”
“We want to improve on this, henceforth, I will not commission any project that is of low quality”, he declared.
To this end Bogoro explained that the TACIA committe which will work within a period of three months will carry out impact assessment of Education Trust Fund (ETF) interventions from 1999 to 2010 and the TETFund interventions from 2011 to 2019.
“The Committe will also determine the levels of implementation of ETF/TETFund mandates and effectiveness.”
Bogoro explained that the need for self evaluation of the Fund became necessary to identify the challenges and weakness recorded and observed in the course of implementation of existing projects, programmes and intervention lines of the fund and to identify areas of improvement.
He said the asessment will help make physical interventions more qualitative and improve the rankings of universities.
He however informed that the fund is gone a step further to improve content component of interventions as the federal government has approved that in subsequent budgets, more funds will be given to research, journals, publication, book development and the likes.
The ES noted that the members of the committe have been carefully picked to reflect some of the best experts in development work, research and scholarship.
The co-chairman of the Committe, Placid Njoku in his acceptance speech applauded the TETFund for choosing to evaluate itself after 20 years. He said the committe will work as a team to identify gaps and areas that needs to be improved on.
The Committe is also chaired by Darma Nazifi and it’s members are largely members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities.
The Committee is expected to submit a report on or before 29th November, 2019.
Godsgift Onyedinefu
