How 400 FUDMA Staff Benefitted From TETFund – Ex-R&D Director
No fewer than 400 teaching and non-teaching staff of Federal University Dutsin-Ma have attended various conferences with funding support from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).
The former Director of the University’s Research and Development (R&D) directorate, Prof. Muhammed Ghazali Garba, who made this known, said the funding support for the 400 staff was between 2018 and 2022.
According to him, all those who attended the conference have rendered account as stipulated by the TETFund under its Institutional Based Research (IBR).
According to him, the diligence shown by the University made it possible not to have any IBR backlog, opening the space to continue to receive the funding since 2023, even after TETFund placed a ban on the release of such funds.
“TETFund has placed a ban on accessing conferences as they asked all Universities to retire backlog of all conferences and amongst all the Universities in Nigeria, FUDMA is amongst the first to clear all its backlog.
“Ever since, FUDMA has been enjoying conferences and retiring on time,”.Prof. Garba said.
He also said a lot of lecturers and other staff have been supported to further their studies locally and internationally through scholarship and fellowships.
“I just continued from where my predecessors stopped by supporting them internationally and locally, up until the time the award of international scholarship was stopped. However, local scholarship is still moving on,” he said.
“FUDMA is always the first University to access its funds each year. Another major achievement I brought to the Directorate is that the university has never benefitted from the manuscript development, until I came on board.
“Among those that benefitted from the backlog of the manuscript development was the former director of ICT, Suleiman Alhaji. Subsequently, the R&D directorate processed about seven teams and authors and later on processed nine teams, making a total number of twenty-one people who have benefitted from the manuscript development”, he added.
Prof Garba said that the directorate under his leadership, created a research policy document which was approved by the University management.
On challenges faced during his tenure, Prof Garba funding was meagre while the number of people seeking to benefit was very high.
“There are meagre resources available and lots of people seeking to benefit. One tends to find himself in a tight situation as such people tend to be angry if they asked you for help and you couldn’t do it for them. It is important for people to understand that if they are patient, they will all benefit from the TETFund intervention programme.”
The former R&D director thanked God for a successful tenure, former acting Vice Chancellor, Dr. Babangida Dangani who first appointed him in February 2020, and former Vice Chancellor, Prof. Armaya’u Hamisu Bichi who kept on renewing his tenure, as well as the immediate past Acting Vice Chancellor, Prof Aminu Ado, and the current Vice Chancellor, Prof. M.K. Othman, who did everything possible to see that the directorate succeeds.
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