The management of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU) Bauchi, has kicked off a two-day training workshop for 150 academics and research staff on how to write grant-winning proposals.
Professor Muhammad Abdulaziz, the citadel’s Vice-Chancellor disclosed this during the opening ceremony of the workshop in Bauchi on Tuesday. He said the exercise was to support the staff and revamp their skills to enable them to compete, write, and attract more grants to the institution.
Professor AbdulAziz represented by Professor Ibrahim Garba, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Administration, said the initiative started last year when the institution hosted the first North East workshop on grant-winning proposals.
“Arising from that workshop, we submitted proposals and we were able to scale through in such a way that 10 of our proposals were given the right to access funds through the National Research Fund,” he said, adding nine proposals were obtained through Institutional Base Research.
According to the VC, the grant attracted by the university would go a long way in supporting it to re-establish its mandates as a research institution.
Speaking at the event, Profsessor Fatima Sawa, the head of Directorate of Research Innovation and Development of the institution, explained that ATBU got N219,000,000 approval for 10 proposals under the National Research Fund and N16.8 million under Institutional Base Research.
She added: “The workshop is for us to help our colleagues because they have topics, they have concept notes to submit but we have to screen and correct them effectively so that when submitted to TETFund, we will not get rejections. It’s not as if people have not been applying in the past, they have been applying but because of not following guidelines, budgetary regulations and so many other factors, they were not successful.
“During this workshop, we will check all these things to make sure that the proposals follow the guidelines and the budget are okay before we can send them to TETFund.”
