Kuni Tyessi in Abuja
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said it has trained about 17,000 academic staff of various public education institutions on information and communication technology (ICT) in the last two years.
The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, made this known during the Asset Declaration, Security and Fraud Detection Awareness Workshop /TETFund SERVICOM Week held in Abuja yesterday.
Echono, who expressed delight over the level of impact TETFund had brought to bear in public higher education institutions in the country, said the Fund has also trained 37,000 academic staff and sponsored 98,000 others to attend workshops and conferences.
“Since the signing of the TETFund Act of 2011 into law by Mr. President, the impact of the Fund has been felt by all our stakeholders as is evident through the magnitude of projects and programs for both infrastructure and human capacity development of all academic staff of the public tertiary institutions.
“It is something we are very proud of. If you go to our campuses across the country in our beneficiary tertiary institutions, the TETFund logo has become so synonymous with many of the physical structures that we have.
“If you notice, even when unions are agitating they never mention TETFund as part of their problem because we have been able to train 37,000 of them.
“Ninety-eight thousand academic and non-academic staff of our tertiary institutions have been sponsored to attend conferences and workshops all over the globe in addition to the 37, 000 that have acquired masters and PhDs through the intervention of TETFund.”
The TETFund boss, who was conferred Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) by President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, congratulated the immediate past Chairman of the Fund’s Board of Trustees, Kashim Ibrahim-Imam and former Executive Secretary, Professor Suleiman Bogoro for bagging OFR and OON respectively, saying the awards were well deserved.
On the recent move by TETFund to leverage more on ICT and ensure seamless delivery of its mandate, Echono said the Fund would soon ensure major processes in some areas of interventions are strictly done through online.
“Nearly 17, 000 academic staff, this is outside the figure I gave earlier, in the last two years have been trained on ICT, so that they can deliver and carry out their functions well.
“This year we have approved that all the interventions that have to do online. We don’t want them to send papers to us, we don’t even what face to face contact,” Echono said, adding that such step would likely been extended to library and academic training intervention lines.
Speaking further, Echono called on TETFund staff to ensure that what was learnt at the workshop was put into use appropriately especially in the area of service delivery, adding that the Agency staff that have distinguished themselves in service delivery will be honoured by end of the year.
On his part, National Coordinator of Servicom, Mrs. Nnena Akajemeli, commended Echono, TETFund’s Head of Servicom Unit, Ebere Nwobu, among others, for ensuring successful celebration of the Customers Service Week.
While saying this year’s Customer Service Week had as its theme: ‘Celebrate Service’, Akajemeli expressed satisfaction with the open communication between TETFund and its stakeholders, saying it was a right step in the right direction.
