According to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), recent CBN policy had made it harder to pay for overseas scholarship students’ tuition and stipends.
Sonny Echono, the TETFund’s executive secretary, announced this at a one-day stakeholder engagement on emerging issues with the TETFund intervention on Wednesday in Abuja.
Echono stated that the fund was considering suspending overseas scholarships while also evaluating an increase in local scholarships because the monies allocated were not adequate to support the programmes under its Tertiary Scholarship for Academic Staff (TSAS) scheme.
“At this crucial juncture, the fund is also preventing beneficiary institutions from starting new Benchwork activities.
“There are also problems with scholars who don’t serve their sentences at their home institutions after their programmes are through.
“In fact, the problem of students running away has complicated and undermined the TSAS initiative, putting it in the spotlight.
“This engagement was planned for these and other reasons. To ensure the successful and seamless implementation of our scholarship schemes, we must address these issues and find answers, he said.
The fund recently inked multiple Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with some famous institutions abroad, including universities in Malaysia, India, Brazil, France, and the United States, the executive secretary remarked, with a view to advancing and improving the TSAS programme in the future.
Chris Maiyaki, acting executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), also made a statement in which he emphasised the need for new financing strategies while ensuring that qualitative funding is sensitive to the changing and demanding circumstances.
For a greater return on investment on its projects, Maiyaki urged the fund to update its quality assurance monitoring system.
In the meantime, Mrs. Miriam Onuoha, the chairman of the House Committee on TETFund, stated that in order to achieve inclusion, particularly with Persons Living With Disabilities (PLWD), it was necessary to make basic infrastructure available in tertiary institutions.
“In our physical planning, we must make the building accessible to be accommodating to the needs of PLWD,” the woman stated.
In a same spirit, Prof. Peter Okebukola, a former executive secretary of the NUC, asked for the establishment of a monitoring and implementation structure to guarantee that university academic calendars were followed.
Okebukola called for fewer TETFund supervises scholarships while promoting in-country training in TETFund reinforced PG programmes in his speech on TSAS, developing difficulties, and potential remedies.
He suggested that instead of continuously pouring money into overseas education, local universities should be given access to cutting-edge facilities for postgraduate programme approval.
“In order to address these issues, it is necessary to provide TETFund support for outstanding teachers from foreign universities to visit Nigeria and participate in local PG training by Nigerian professors.
To improve doctorate education and supervision, he stated, “We must send professors (with at least 10 years of experience) for capacity building to elite foreign universities in carefully chosen programmes.
