In a move aimed at addressing growing concerns over incessant increases in tuition fees across tertiary institutions, the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has introduced a Price Resolution Button on its newly redesigned portal.
Akintunde Sawyerr, the managing director at NELFUND, disclosed this on Thursday during an interview in Lagos, when he explained that the button is geared towards providing students with a platform to flag and seek clarification on suspected arbitrary fee hikes by their institutions.
‘We’ve introduced something on our new portal, which is the price resolution or price dispute button where the student can look at the fees before they apply for the loan and/or dispute it.
‘Most of the schools understand that they are going to be the people who lose out if they put themselves in a situation where they’re pricing themselves out of a funding opportunity,’ he said.
The initiative is expected to strengthen transparency and accountability in the administration of institutional charges while giving students an avenue to challenge unexplained increases in tuition and other approved fees.
Sawyerr emphasised that NELFUND had made it clear to various tertiary institutions that the agency will not fund them if they increase their fees beyond a certain level.
Meanwhile, NELFUND managing director urged all higher institutions to put all the data for their students on the database provided by the loan agency to make it easy for students to access the portal.
‘Our portal is pretty much error-free; however, it has some dependencies. We expect all the schools to put all the data for all the students in a database.
‘So that when the students come to apply, they can fetch their information from that database. If the schools don’t provide that information, the student will see an error,’ he noted.
Sawyerr explained that information about students cannot be fetched if they are not entered into the database by their various institutions.
‘All government-owned tertiary institutions are supposed to provide us with the name, the date of birth, the course, the matric number, sometimes the name of that particular, of all their students.
‘Because when the ones that want to apply come, that data is fetched from that database to confirm who they are. So what you are seeing as glitches sometimes is because the schools haven’t done their part.
We continue to encourage the schools to provide the data on the database and ensure that they understand that if they don’t, it is going to affect the funding that’s coming to their institution,’ he said.
Speaking on recovery the loans considering that past efforts on this failed, he said that recovery the loans from beneficiaries are very important, but emphasised that is not the only source of sustaining the NEL FUND.
‘We have other sources to raise funds; we’re able to invest the funds we have, receive donations.
‘We’ve already started recovering some funds; some people are already paying back,’ he said.
However, Sawyerr noted that the idea behind NELFUND goes beyond loan recovery to ensuring all Nigerians, including indigent students, are educated.
‘I think most importantly, if we get our youth educated and empowered, there will be a larger tax base, more money will be collected from the taxation system, and it will be used, given the approach of this government, to fund education further, including NELFUND.
‘The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has recognised that the sustainability of Nigeria is primary; one of the things that’s going to help this country become sustainable is to ensure that our young people are educated. Our primary focus is to educate people,’ he emphasised.
Moreover, he stressed that the sustainability of the country is greater than the sustainability of anything else, and that without education, Nigeria will continue to slide into poverty.
‘We see the support of education through taxation, because we have more people being funded to get the right sort of qualifications to make them employable.
‘That’s a critical part of NELFUND’s goal, and we need to think holistically about this. We’re not necessarily worried about the recovery as we are about ensuring that Nigerians are empowered through education,’ he said.