The Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) has called on the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) to open a fresh intervention in the direction of curriculum development to advance polytechnic education in the country.

The ASUP national president, Anderson Ezeibe, disclosed this in Abuja on Thursday at a two-day interactive session between TETFund and unions of beneficiary institutions.

Mr Ezeibe said curriculum development was integral to tertiary education that fosters functional and impactful tertiary education. Expressing dissatisfaction at how the TETFund sets up its committee without the involvement of the polytechnic unions, he said this should be corrected to enhance effective participation.

“These activities are eye-opening events, but they can only get better because the feedback from these engagements are in the processes, and TETFund can only improve their impact in the education sector. This particular monitoring exercise should go beyond physical infrastructure projects. I know that TETFund is involved in other intervention lines of staff training development, research and planning and so on.

“At this level, we still have a significant level of abuse at the institutional level, and it is only the involvement of the unions that can check this. Therefore, it is very important that TETFund should design a policy position to ensure trade unions are involved in the level of monitoring and evaluation in the institutions,” he said.

Mr Ezeibe also charged TETFund to include the trade unions in its programmes and projects for accountability and delivery of its projects in the tertiary institutions.

“We call for a better inclusion of our sector in the strategic committee of TETFund. Our position is that you cannot build capacity by exclusion. The continued exclusion of our sector from the committee of TETFund will continue to undermine capacity building in our sector and also the capacity of the sector to actively compete in the areas of research fund,” he added.

He blamed the abuse of TETFund’s project in tertiary institutions on stakeholding activities undermining the impact of the agency’s projects.

TETFund executive secretary Sonny Echono stressed the need to engage and challenge one another to improve the institutions consistently. Mr Echono said the engagement was also to sustain tertiary education’s steady growth and development.

He called for the urgent need for all stakeholders to unify efforts to reposition our tertiary institutions for the challenges of the times, especially in dealing with strike actions in the institutions.

(NAN)