The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) will partner with relevant agencies to boost Artificial Intelligence (AI) studies in the nation’s tertiary institutions.

The executive secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, said this during an interview with journalists in Abuja on Friday.

He said the fund had drastically scaled up textbook production in addition to other initiatives, such as ICT centres, to position Nigeria as a leader in AI in Africa.

Mr Echono said this was part of TETFund’s contribution to the nation’s quest to tap into the multitrillion-dollar global digital economy.

He said AI is one of the few subject areas where the fund could send scholars abroad for further training because it had not fully developed in Nigeria.

“We don’t send anybody outside anymore. But AI is a new and expanding field. It is one of the few areas we are training people abroad because we want to lead in Africa,’’ he told journalists.

He said the fund had supported the development of AI textbooks, covering topics such as AI in teaching and learning, ethics, and curriculum development.

Mr Echono said the aim was to boost the use of AI and get the tertiary institutions to begin exploiting and using it in teaching and learning.

He said that in addition to book development, TETFund had trained over 3,000 scholars in AI and emerging ICT trends in the last two years in collaboration with leading institutions.

He explained that the initiative had resulted in the ICT training of over 17,000 educators through the International Computer Driving License (ICDL) programme.

“We want to leapfrog others in ICT and robotics. We are coming very strong in robotics now, but we are latecomers; some people are already doing it before us.

“But we don’t want anybody to be ahead of us on this continent. So we are pushing those frontiers,” he said.

Mr Echono also said the present TETFund management inherited a stagnated book development programme that published only 20 books in 13 years.

He said that upon assuming office in 2022, he challenged the book development committee to meet ambitious targets of producing more books.

Mr Echono said the challenge spurred the book development committee as TETFund published 50 books in 2023, another 60 shortly after, and another tranche of 50 textbooks recently published.

He explained that another batch of 50 textbooks was currently under production.

(NAN)