The Tertiary Education Trust Fund has expressed hope that the annual allocation to the National Research Fund will hit N10 billion in 2022.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Prof Suleiman Bogoro, said the agency’s Board of Trustees had recently approved N8.5billion as 2021 allocation for NRF.
Bogoro stated this on Sunday at a virtual meeting on ‘Democratisation of Higher Education in Nigeria through Open Access,’ co-hosted by TETFund and the Training Centre in Communication, Nairobi, as part of activities to mark International Open Access Week.
According to the TETFund boss, following the agency’s proposal, the Board of Trustees had in 2019 approved N5billion for NRF, which was raised to N7.5 billion in 2020 and N8.5 billion in 2021.
He said, “Over the last two and half years now, we have raised funds available for research. They are two categories; institution-based and National Research Fund.
“The institution-based has a ceiling of about $3,600 and it is for mainly basic research while the higher ceiling grant of about $92,000 or $93,000 is the National Research Fund aimed at promoting applied research, and to that extent, in 2019, I made a case to the Board of Trustees of TETFund to increase the threshold.
“It used to be a kind of seed money. Seed money of N4 billion for eight years but from the year 2019 to last year and this year, we increased it to N5 billion annually. Last year, we increased it from N5 billion to N7.5 billion and this year it is N8.5 billion and we are hoping in 2022 it will move to N10 billion.”
He said NRF is one of the major platforms put in place by the government through TETFund to support the academic community in research to achieve specific objectives, particularly in the area of science, technology and innovation.
While expressing the readiness of TETFund to always mainstream open access/science through massive support for Research and Development, Bogoro said the Fund had recently established 12 centres of excellence across the country.
He said the move was aimed at supporting cutting-edge research mainly in universities so as to provide solutions to various problems bedevilling the society as well as position Nigeria as a major player in the knowledge economy.
