The Federal Government has announced that tertiary institutions with student populations below 2,000 will no longer be eligible for funding from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), marking a significant shift in Nigeria’s tertiary education funding policy.
The Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, made this known on Friday, May 16, during a one-day strategic engagement with heads of institutions, bursars, and procurement officers in Lagos. The session was part of efforts to review the 2024/2025 intervention guidelines and promote transparency in the TETFund disbursement process.
“We are re-evaluating how institutions benefit from TETFund,” Alausa said. “We can no longer incentivise poor performance or underutilisation of public resources.”
According to him, some institutions established as far back as 2019 still have fewer than 600 students but continue to receive the same level of funding as those with enrolments exceeding 18,000 — a practice he described as inefficient and unsustainable.
New Benchmark Introduced
“To address this imbalance,” he said, “any institution that, after five years of operation, still has fewer than 2,000 enrolled students may be deemed ineligible for TETFund support until it scales up its capacity.”
The minister disclosed that certain institutions have less than 30 students and had been accessing TETFund funding all the while.
He also cautioned against the proliferation of satellite campuses, describing the trend as “unsustainable and counterproductive,” and revealed that the ministry was already auditing affected institutions.
Foreign Scholarships and Local Capacity
Alausa also disclosed a shift in government policy regarding foreign scholarships. He said a significant percentage of students sent abroad on government-funded scholarships fail to return, rendering the investments ineffective.
“Evidence-based analysis shows that 85% of students we sponsor abroad never return to contribute to national development. Many of the programmes they pursue could be handled locally,” the minister said.
To address this, the ministry has established 28 Centres of Excellence across public and private universities to offer competitive postgraduate programmes and reduce reliance on overseas training.
TETFund: Performance-Driven Model Ahead
In his remarks, the Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono, said the agency is moving toward a performance-based funding model that emphasizes accountability and results.
“Institutional expansion must be checked,” he said. “Institutions that fail to access, utilize, or retire funds appropriately—or those that fall below enrolment and performance thresholds—risk being delisted from the list of TETFund beneficiaries.”
Echono emphasized that the goal of the new policy is not to punish institutions but to safeguard the impact and credibility of TETFund interventions.
“This engagement is a call to action,” he concluded. “We are committing to best practices in governance, project execution, and transparency in the tertiary education sector.”
The reforms are part of President Bola Tinubu’s administration’s broader agenda to ensure that every naira spent on education delivers measurable value and drives national development.
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