Beaming searchlight on Tertiary Education Trust Fund

by Usman Alabi

Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) is an education intervention fund, basically dedicated to the enhancement of education in Nigeria’s Public Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education. It would interest you to know that Private Universities cannot access the fund. The fund is targeted at providing infrastructures for tertiary institutions and enhancing research and development.It replaced the popular Education Tax Fund (ETF).

Most public tertiary institutions in Nigeria are dotted with one TETFund project or another which ranges from physical infrastructure to class room facilities aimed at making learning environment conducive.

TetFund was established by an act of the National Assembly in June 2011. The act replaced the Education Tax Fund (ETF). The Fund was set up to administer and disburse education tax collections to the Federal and State tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The main source of income for the fund is the 2% education tax paid from accessible profit of companies registered in Nigeria. The levies are collected by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS).

TetFund administers the education tax collected for it by the FIRS and disburses the amount to tertiary educational institutions at the Federal and State levels. It also monitors and track the projects executed with the funds allocated to the beneficiaries.

The Fund’s area of intervention includes:

• Provision of essential physical infrastructure for teaching and learning
• Provision of instructional material and equipment
• Research and publication
• Academic staff training and development
• Any other need which, in the opinion of the Board of Trustees, is critical and essential for the improvement of quality and maintenance of standards in the higher educational institutions

The distribution of funds shall be in the ratio of 2:1:1 as between Universities, polytechnics and colleges of education respectively. The act however provides that fairness and equality should be ensured in the distribution of the funds to the beneficiary institutions.

Guidelines for the accessing the Fund

1. The prospective beneficiary must be a Public Tertiary Institution that is Federal or State University, Polytechnic and College of Education.
2. Such institution must be recognized by the relevant regulatory body- NUC, NBTE or NCCE as the case may be and evidence of this should be available both with the institution and the regulatory body for citing
3. The institution must have been established by law via an Act of Parliament or Edict of the State House of Assembly and signed into law by the President or State Governor, as the case may be.

TETFund interventions are in the following categories

• Annual Interventions which includes Infrastructural and equipment/furniture-based intervention projects; Library Intervention, Academic Staff Training and Development, Journal Publication. Annual intervention is yearly for all beneficiaries of TETFund.
• Special Intervention which is usually at the discretion of the Board of Trustees.
• Special High Impact Intervention which seeks to massively inject funds into selected tertiary institutions to achieve a major turnaround through programme upgrade and improvement in the teaching and learning environment.

The annual intervention allocation is always available for institutions to access on a yearly basis. Some of the prerequisites for accessing the funds include:

Infrastructure/Equipment/Furnishing-Based Intervention

The beneficiary must have fully completed the previous year’s intervention projects with release of the final tranche

For beneficiaries in arrears of accursedness dedicated allocations, the board of trustees allows for a merger of up to 4years of the unaccessed allocations; subject however to the satisfactory completion and verification of the previous year’s intervention projects. However, concurrent utilization of yearly allocations is not allowed, that is, the Fund does not approve of intervention projects of different years running together.

Submission of proposed projects to the Fund to the sum of the allocated amount must be in line with the beneficiary institution’s core mandate and should be relevant to teaching, learning and research; including the learning and teaching environment.

Release of funds in tranches follows the satisfactory conclusion of the Due Process

There are also academic requirement which most times are research based. The issue most times is that despite the TETFund grant, yet most public tertiary institutions still lag behind in terms of infrastructural amenities. Most times the quality of the projects that benefits from the fund is sometimes nothing to write home about. This is exactly where transparency and accountability comes to play. Some Universities gets substandard product with the fund which cannot stand the test of time.

One also begin to question where tertiary institutions sometimes find it difficult to access the Annual intervention, the only explanation is that they were not able to complete the previous year intervention projects.

Tetfund has been beneficial to public institutions, but there is still more to be done when it comes tracking what exactly the funds are used for and the quality of the project.

Let us know tetfund projects going on in your tertiary institutions.

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