By Asaye Bankole
The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has announced plans to prevent students from benefiting from its loan scheme while their parents continue to pay their school fees.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this on Wednesday during a press briefing, explaining that the fund had identified cases of students allegedly receiving loans while still relying on their parents to finance their education.
Sawyerr said the development had prompted the fund to strengthen its payment procedures and improve transparency in the administration of the student loan scheme.
“This comment is based on our recognition that there are so many students out there who are double-dipping. They are taking from NELFUND and still stressing their parents,” he said.
“We are going to put an end to that,” he added.
The NELFUND chief executive explained that the fund planned to introduce an arrangement that would allow parents to confirm whether their children’s school fees had been paid without necessarily disclosing the amount involved.
He said the measure was intended to improve transparency and help parents understand the financial arrangements surrounding their children’s education.
The development comes as the Federal Government continues to implement its student loan programme, designed to reduce the financial burden of tertiary education and enable eligible Nigerian students to access higher education.
Under the scheme, NELFUND provides loans to cover institutional fees, while upkeep allowances are processed separately to support beneficiaries’ living expenses.
Sawyerr also announced plans to organise re-education workshops across the country’s six geopolitical zones to explain changes to the programme and address misunderstandings among students, parents and tertiary institutions.
He said the exercise would go beyond the fund’s regular sensitisation campaigns by helping stakeholders understand the revised payment procedures.
“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.
“This is not sensitisation. This is re-education of the stakeholders and the students as to the changes that we have made in their favour,” he added.
Sawyerr said the fund would rely on the workshops and media engagements to ensure that students and institutions were properly informed about the changes.
He urged journalists to help publicise the new arrangements, noting that the workshops might not reach every student who needed the information.
Meanwhile, NELFUND’s Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, explained that the fund’s payment system was designed to reduce intermediaries in the transfer of institutional fees.
Iyal said the fund used students’ application identification numbers and wallet numbers to process institutional payments rather than their regular bank account numbers.
“To be clear, we don’t use account numbers. We use their application ID and wallet number,” he said.
He explained that payments for institutional fees were handled separately from upkeep allowances, which were transferred to students’ personal bank accounts through designated payment channels.
According to him, NELFUND uses services such as the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System’s Instant Payment platform and Paystack to process upkeep allowances because the fund is not a banking institution and cannot provide students with conventional bank accounts.
He acknowledged that payments through external service providers could sometimes be delayed, depending on the financial institutions involved.
Iyal disclosed that approximately 400,000 students were involved in the pilot phase of the payment system, while about 20,000 additional students had been recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing.
He added that the system processed transactions for nearly 5,000 students daily.
“We are not talking about 20,000. No, we are talking about 400,000,” he said.
The executive director explained that the system used a token-based arrangement linked to each student’s application identification number, with a wallet attached to the application.
He said the upkeep wallet operated separately from the mechanism used to process institutional payments.
Iyal also clarified that students could download receipts from the NELFUND platform after their school fees had been processed.
He, however, noted that receipts issued by the fund were different from those provided by individual tertiary institutions, which maintained their own procedures for issuing payment receipts and clearance documents required for departmental registration and other academic activities.
“Presently, on the NELFUND system, when they pay, they can download a receipt. We have that already,” he said.
The fund said the measures were part of ongoing efforts to improve transparency, streamline payment processes and ensure that stakeholders understood how institutional fees and upkeep allowances were administered under the student loan scheme.
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