Echono Tasks Institutions On Proper Planning

Beneficiary Institutions of TETFund have been advised to imbibe a culture of planning as a necessary measure to guard against delays and consequent price variations in the cost of project implementation.

Executive Secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Arc Sonny Echono gave the charge when the Committee of Provosts, led by its Chairman, Mr. Amos Bulus Cirfat, paid a courtesy visit to the Agency recently.

Echono stated that the rising cost of materials has affected not only TETFund projects, but every aspect of economic life of the country and must be tackled with proper planning, even prior to release of allocations to the institutions.

He reiterated that since projects emanate from beneficiary institutions, they should have a clear roadmap to executing the projects even before the allocations are communicated to them.

“In an atmosphere where there is manifest instability in the building materials and equipment market, it is difficult to hold down the prices of goods and services of contracts and we must become extremely nimble in how we manage those contracts to mitigate the adverse impact; which is why we are emphasising the issue of timeliness. We want to encourage all our beneficiary institutions to ensure that as soon as allocations are made to you, you act speedily in identifying and committing your projects”.

“Every institution must have a master plan. You must have a projection of your growth over five, ten or even thirty years; and accompanying those broad projections are areas about your academic development – how many courses do you want to run, how many are you adding, how many are you elevating and the accompanying infrastructure needs.

“This is so that at each point in time, if you are told that this is the money to intervene in your school, all you need to adjust would just be the quantities because of the volatility in the markets. We want you to do the same thing with the management of your projects. You must do everything possible to discourage delays”, he emphasised.

Responding to the request for a waiver on Teaching Practice for the newly established Colleges of Education, the TETFund assured the Committee that the Fund is already in the process of making necessary adjustments and reviews, which would be rolled out soon for implementation.

In his remarks, Cirfat extolled the passion of the Executive Secretary of TETFund to education, stating that he has contributed immensely to the giant strides that TETFund is making towards improving the tertiary education sector of the nation.

He congratulated Echono on his appointment, outlining several areas of concern that needed the attention of the TETFund boss.

Among the requests made by the committee to the Executive Secretary are the provision of waivers for newly established institutions regarding allocations for Teaching Practice to a further date when students are more readily available, insurance policy in colleges of education, provision of security for TETFund funded laboratories and workshop and variation in the cost of materials.