The Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, says it is deliberately refocusing its intervention activities to support learning outcomes and employability of Nigerian tertiary education graduates.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono, who disclosed this at the National Employability Programme Implementation Support Workshop in Abuja, decried challenges of high unemployment bedevilling the nation as a result of its import-dependent status.
Echono said the Strategic and Operational Plan for refocusing TETFund entrepreneurship intervention for employability and innovation was approved by the Federal Ministry of Education in March 2023.
He added that following the approval, the requirements and guidelines for accessing entrepreneurship development intervention of the Fund were revised in line with the approved Plan.
“An increasing number of young Nigerian graduates from tertiary education institutions are being released into the labour market with a continuously shrinking absorptive capacity.
“The structure of the economy which is largely import dependent has further limited the ability of the country to generate commensurable jobs due to low level of industrialization, thereby aggravating the unemployment situation in Nigeria,” he said.
The TETFund boss said the International Finance Corporation, IFC, assisted the fund to conduct the employability benchmarking assessment programme for some selected universities, reflecting representative sample across the country between September 2022 and January 2023.
According to him, “the objective of undertaking the assessment of practices and processes supporting employability in our higher institutions, was to identify sector trends and provide comparative institutional findings on employability situation on a system level, to provide a starting baseline to guide the development of specific interventions at both institutional and system level.
“The Report of the employability benchmarking exercise covers the five dimensions of employability viz: relevance of learning, governance and strategy, employer engagement, career services/guidance, and alumni management. It highlighted how student employability support at the universities aligns to good practices globally.
“The Report indicates that the aggregate average score of Nigerian benchmark institutions across the five dimensions of employability is 2.3 out of 4.0 which is just above the average of all institutions benchmarked globally (2.2).
“The Report which also covers the assessment of the institutions’ Digital Learning Strategy shows that surveyed universities lagged behind global best practices in application of digital learning strategies, access to large multidisciplinary databases and digital course-reserves as well as the level of faculty digital skills. This obviously require deliberate action on the part of all stakeholders to address our peculiar challenges,” he said.
He noted that the Implementation Support Workshop for which we are all gathered here today, marks the commencement of the second phase of the employability programmes, focusing on the implementation of the recommendations from the benchmarking exercise and capacity building in the five employability dimensions which the IFC Vitae instrument examined.
