NELFUND links loan portal to schools for easy verification

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund has commenced moves to ensure that its site is linked to the portals of institutions, to enable ease of verification.

The Executive Director, Operations, Mustapha Iyal, disclosed this during the sensitisation programme held at the University of Ilorin for higher institutions in Kwara State, on Tuesday.

Iyal said, “We observed that one of the problems we have is that 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.

“By doing that, when a student is trying to register 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,” he said.

Speaking further on complaints raised by students of beneficiary institutions in the state, the NELFUND top official said “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.”

The representative of the National Association of Nigerian Students on the NELFUND board, Umar Farouk, said the loan would further encourage indigent students to have access to higher education.

“One of the campaign promises of President Bola Tinubu 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 nobody can now access higher education easily.

With access to student loans, everyone now has the ease to go to school,” he said.

The implementation of the student loan scheme is Tinubu’s flagship project in the education sector, as barely a month after his inauguration, he signed the Access to Higher Education Act, which creates a legal framework for granting loans to indigent or low-income Nigerians to facilitate the payment of their fees in Nigerian tertiary institutions.