The Impact of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) Intervention on Academic Staff Training in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions: A Case Study of Aminu Saleh College of Education, Azare Bauchi State.

Abstract

This paper focused on the impact of Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) intervention in staff training in tertiary institutions in Nigeria, using Aminu Saleh College of Education Azare, Bauchi State as a case study. The study examined the issues of staff development before and after the establishment of TETFund in the Institution. The Academic Staff Training and Development (AST&D) Programme of TETFund is an intervention carefully articulated to address academic training needs of beneficiary institutions. Aminu Saleh College of Education Azare is one of the 232 beneficiary institutions of TETFund intervention in Nigeria. The College started benefiting from the AST&D TETFund intervention during the 2007/2008 Academic Session. The research population covers all the academic staff of the institution distributed in 25 Academic Departments. As there are total of 570 academic staff, 20% of them (114) constituted the sample used for data generation. The study made use of documentary records and questionnaire as instruments for data collection. Percentage was used to analyse the data. The results revealed that, there was very poor level of academic staff training in Aminu Saleh College of Education Azare before the introduction of Academic Staff Training and Development (AST&D) by TETFund and that TETFund made a great impact towards improving quality of staff and hence improvementin teaching and learning in the institution. Furthermore, AST&D proved to be a strong motivating factor to staff towards pursuing higher education studies locally and internationally. This depicts the situation in most tertiary institutions in Nigeria, more especially among the states owned ones, that suffer serious underfunding by their States governments. A number of suggestions were offered towards improving service delivery in TETFund intervention for Staff Training and Development, which include increasing fund allocation to AST&D, addressing the problem of belated admission and extension of the programme to Non Academic Staff as well.