The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has earmarked the sum of N10 billion to carry out mechanised agriculture on vast land of Nigerian universities as part of the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu to boost food security.
Similarly, the Fund has also earmarked money for relevant training institutions for the procurement of cadavers that will be used for simulation in the training of medical students and other health personnel.
A member of Board of Trustees of TETFund representing the North-central zone, Nurudeen Adeyemi, made the disclosure while featuring at the 10th edition of strategic media seminar organised by the Nigerian Media Parliament in conjunction with the Sobi Fm Chapel of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), Kwara state council, in Ilorin, weekend.
Adeyemi said TETFund is instrumental to implementing the “progressive ideas” of President Tinubu’s administration, reason why it has designed intervention programmes that cut across education, health, agriculture, economy, engineering and power sectors.
He said the proposed mechanised school farming initiative would take advantage of the vast expanse of land lying fallow on Nigarian varsities to address the nation’s food security challenges.
“University is one of the areas where the federal government has a huge expanse of land that can be cultivated that is also secured,” he said. Adeyemi added that fund for the project take-off have been included in its budget which he said would commence as soon as the process is completed .
On the “Japa syndrome,” which he said is negatively impacting on the nation’s health sector, Adeyemi said the agency had equally earmarked funds for the procurement of cadavers under its “medical expansion “programmes, designed to address the drastic short fall in manpower that is occasioned by the growing brain drain in the health sector.
He said the cadavers would be used in the training of medical students and other health personnel to bridge the manpower gaps in the health sector across the country as part of the Fund’s intervention through the relevant training institutions.