Issues in Academics’ Apathy to TETFund Conference Attendance Funding Support Raheemat Adeniran The Lagos State University’s TETFund Desk Office recently announced call for applications from staff members for TETFund’s loca
The Lagos State University’s TETFund Desk Office recently announced call for applications from staff members for TETFund’s local and international Conference Attendance intervention “applicable to conferences with scheduled dates from April to June, 2023”. Ideally, this should be good news for the university community, offering academic and non-academic staff the rare opportunity to travel for conferences and workshops to any part of the world, fully-funded.
In line with the TETFund intervention guideline, beneficiary institutions are expected to collate staff applications, process and submit their recommendation for the utilisation of conference attendance intervention on behalf of their staff not later than two months before the conference date. Institutions can make the submission up to four times in a year. As simple as this seems, this basic preliminary requirement already impedes access to many academic staff.
For instance, the university’s previous call was made in May 2022 with June 30th, 2022 deadline for conferences slated for September to December, 2022. I intentionally ignored the call then since it was only for sponsorship of local conferences. I was not interested in going through the hurdle to seek support to attend a local conference I can still struggle to fund personally, as many academics do. Not with the low possibility of approval anyway.
Over the period, from 2010-2020, academic and non-academic staff in LASU received 454 CA interventions for local and international conferences. Interestingly, Non-academic staff members accessed the fund much more than academic staff members, getting almost 60% of approved TETFund sponsored conference attendance slots.
The published data may not be entirely accurate as some of the beneficiaries listed may not have accessed the fund. I know a senior colleague whose name was listed to have received the fund in 2019 but never assessed the fund as the approval was received few weeks to the conference making it impossible to make the trip with the required visa application process. There are also reports of individuals who were able to use the approval to go for another conference in another year.
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