In order to facilitate verification, the Nigerian Education Loan Fund said that it has started the process of connecting its website to the portals of educational institutions.
Mustapha Iyal, the Fund’s Executive Director of Operations, disclosed this during Tuesday’s awareness-raising event for higher education institutions at the University of Ilorin.
According to Iyal, this was done to make it easier to verify student loan applications.
Sharing more insight on the update, Iyal said, “We observed that one of the problems we are having is the problem of verification. So what NELFUND is trying to do is that we want to engage the institutions directly by linking the NELFUND activities on the institutional portals so by doing that when a student is trying to do registration in school, they can select whether they want to pay via NELFUND, cash or other means.”
“So if the student opts to pay with NELFUND, they will fill in the application with their details which are already on the institutional portals so they don’t have to go to the NELFUND portal. That is the kind of portal we are looking at. We want to create a synergy.”
Speaking further on complaints raised by students of beneficiary institutions in Kwara state, the NELFUND top official said the Fund has commenced work on issues raised.
He stated, “On the issues raised by the students, we are working on ways to make the whole process seamless. We have already started working on the issues. We work 24 hours and we are always there for the student.”
Also speaking, the representative of the National Association of Nigerian Students on the NELFUND board, Umar Farouk, hailed President Bola Tinubu’s administration’s move to establish the student loan initiative.
According to Farouk, the move will further encourage indigent students to have access to higher education.
He added, “One of the campaign promises of the President is the student loan and I am happy to say that the student loan fund is here to stay. Nigerians can now get to understand that children of nobodies can now access higher education easily. With access to student loans, everyone now has the ease to go to school.”
Tinubu’s main initiative in the field of education is the establishment of the student loan program.
The Access to Higher Education Act, which Tinubu signed just one month after taking office, establishes a legal framework for lending money to low-income or impoverished Nigerians to help them pay for their tuition at Nigerian universities.
The Nigerian Education Loan Fund was established by the passed law. All loan requests, awards, disbursements, and recovery are under the purview of NELFUND. The Act states that the Fund will receive funding from a variety of sources and carry out other beneficial endeavors.
