By our correspondent
The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has revealed that over half a million students are currently on its portal benefiting from the loan scheme, with an average of 1,800 applications received daily.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NELFund, Akintunde Sawyerr gave the latest statistics, in Abuja, while welcoming participants to the Stakeholders Engagement Session & Technical Workshop on NELFUND System Automation & Loan Application Processes.
Sawyerr said the stakeholders’ engagement became necessary due to the need to close some observed gaps in the loan applications.
He said the aim of establishing NELFund by the Federal Government goes beyond dishing out loans to students, but to democratize opportunities for every young Nigerian who is willing to learn and grow to have a real shot at education regardless of their background, location, or chosen path of study.
Butressing the idea behind the stakeholders engagement, Sawyerr said for too long, many students especially in technical institutions have faced steep financial barriers. Some drop out. Others never even apply.
“This is the gap we’re here to close. But we know we can’t do it alone. This is a shared mission. It belongs to all of us, government, institutions, and the private sector alike.
“This technical workshop marks a major step forward. We’re not only providing financing we’re building a technology driven system that makes it easier for students to apply, for institutions to verify, and for funds to be disbursed with speed, fairness, and accountability”.
Speaking on some of the perceived challenges and how they hope to close the gaps, the NELFund Boss said, “You know, when you launch a project of this magnitude, what you do is to do all the preparation you can, then you launch it into the marketplace, if I can use that expression, and then you see the reaction, the level of engagement, the issues, and then you make a plan as to how you’re going to make it better.
“So we’re doing this now because, yes, we want to improve what we have already, but we’re going to do this every so often so that, you know, as we discover new things -—new technology, new opportunities, new challenges, new problems — we can address everything in one go”.
The MD also explained that accessing the loan is quite easy provided the students follow the right steps without compromising on accurate data about their educational pursuits.
His words, “From our perspective, as long as they have accessed the institution using JAMB, they can access the loan.
“Now, it’s a loan, so people have to make decisions as to the point at which they want to engage with the loan. What do I mean by that? You know, when you’re taking a loan, you can’t take too many of them in any instance.
“So what you do is, you choose the right course, you choose the right institution, you choose, the things that you believe will help you progress, and then you make that decision. That’s an individual decision. It’s not about just coming and taking the loan.
“It’s about taking the loan for something that you believe will help further your own position educationally and in life. How fast do you process your loan application? As fast as it is safe for the fund. So what I want to be clear on is that in as much as we want to process the loans as quickly as possible, we’re also managing government money.
“We’re managing stakeholders’ funds. So we try to carry out proper checks. We don’t want to be in a situation where we say we’ll give you a loan in 10 days, and then we discover that some of the loan applications are faulty, and then we can’t do it.
“We don’t want people coming here just for the speed of it. We also have to carry out our due diligence and our own checks”.
Also commenting on the level of beneficiaries so far, he said, “We have about 570,000 registrations, and I’ll just quickly define that.
“A registration is when somebody comes to the loan site and puts in all their details, but they don’t go to the next or final step of actually applying for a loan. We have about 570,000 of those. I think as of today, we’ve probably got about 515,000 applications, people who’ve actually pressed the button that says, I’m applying for this loan.
“Those are the ones that reach us, reach our evaluation team, and we begin to evaluate. So I think it’s safe to say that over half a million people have engaged in this in the last one year and few months and we’re getting about 1,800 applications every single day”.
