The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) says it has trained about 17,000 academic staff on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the last two years.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono, made this known at the (Asset Declaration, Security and Fraud Detection Awareness Workshop /TETFund SERVICOM Week) held in Abuja.
Echono, who expressed satisfaction at the level of impact TETFund has 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 Nigeria’s President, the impact of the Fund has been felt by all our stakeholders as it 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.
“This 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.
“98,000 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.”
“May I use this opportunity to congratulate the immediate past chairman of our Board and the immediate past executive Secretary for the recent national award, it was a great day for TETFund with 3 nominees or awardees,” Echono said.
On the recent move by TETFund to leverage more on ICT to 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 with ICT will have to be done online, we don’t want them to send papers to us, we don’t even want face-to-face contact,” Echono said, adding that such step will likely be extended to the library and academic training intervention lines.
Echono called on TETFund staff to ensure what was learned 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 the end of the year.
The 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 has its theme as ‘Celebrate Service’, Akajemeli expressed satisfaction with the open communication between TETFund and its stakeholders, saying it is the right step in the right direction.
Head, TETFund’s SERVICOM Unit, Mrs Ebere Nwobu, who said the Agency would continue to give the desired attention to all its stakeholders, commended Echono for always providing the necessary support to ensure better service delivery ’’We cannot thank you enough sir,” she said.
Olusola Akintonde
