The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has announced plans to stop students from collecting government-backed education loans while still asking their parents to pay their school fees.
The Managing Director of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this on Wednesday during a press briefing in Abuja.
He said the fund had discovered cases of students benefiting from the loan scheme while their parents continued to pay their tuition fees.
Under the new arrangement, parents will be able to check whether NELFUND has paid their children’s school fees.
However, they will not necessarily have access to the exact amount paid.
Sawyerr said the plan was designed to prevent parents from carrying the financial burden of their children’s education when the government loan scheme had already covered their tuition fees.
As part of efforts to address the problem, NELFUND will organise workshops across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones to educate students, parents and tertiary institutions about the loan scheme and its payment system.
He explained that the exercise would go beyond the usual public awareness campaigns by providing detailed information about changes to the scheme and how they affect beneficiaries.
‘We can easily do a press release and say, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’ But if we don’t educate the institutions, if we don’t educate the students, everybody will still be running behind,’ he said.
He said the fund had discovered cases of students benefiting from the loan scheme while their parents continued to pay their tuition fees.
He added that delays could sometimes occur because of the financial institutions involved in processing the payments.
Providing an update, Iyal disclosed that about 400,000 students were covered by the pilot phase of the payment system.
He said around 20,000 additional students had been recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing, while the system processed transactions for nearly 5,000 students daily.
Iyal further explained that each student had a wallet linked to their application identification number. The wallet system helps the fund manage payments, while institutional fees and upkeep allowances are handled separately.
The Federal Government introduced the student loan scheme to help eligible students access higher education without being prevented from enrolling because they cannot pay their school fees upfront.