The Tertiary Education Trust Fund has said it will be increasing its scholarship support to the nation’s universities to assist them carry out cutting edge research.
This was even as the new Executive Secretary of the fund, Dr. Abdullahi B. Baffa, stated in Yola, the Adamawa State capital, that the N3 billion TETFUND research fund meant as grant to support cutting edge research in the country still remained untapped by scholars.
Baffa said the fund, under his leadership, will be increasing scholarship support so that scholars across the nation’s universities can be able to access grants that will enable them conduct cutting edge research.
He said: “So far we have over N3 billion for Academic research that is yet to be accessed.
“We want to urge University academics to start writing proposals, to start applying so that they can get this monies to carry out research.”
Baffa’s comment over the weekend in Yola came alongside Prof. Andrew Jonathan Nok’s convocation lecture for the 21st and 22nd combined convocation ceremony of the Modibbo Adama University of Technology, Yola with the theme: “Academic Culture: Concepts and the Challenge of University ranking.”
Prof. Nok had observed that for the nation’s universities rankings to improve, the productivity of its scholars must be improved.
He lamented that despite the injection of massive capital into the educational sub-sector, Nigerian universities were still nowhere near the first 500.