The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has announced plans to tighten the administration of its student loan scheme to prevent beneficiaries from receiving financial support while their parents continue to pay their tuition fees.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this on Wednesday during a press briefing, saying the fund had identified cases of students allegedly benefiting from the scheme while still relying on their parents to settle their school fees.
He said the development had prompted the agency to strengthen transparency in its operations and improve communication among students, parents and tertiary institutions participating in the programme.
“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,” Sawyerr said.
He added, “We are going to put an end to that.”
As part of the proposed measures, the fund plans to introduce an arrangement that will enable parents to confirm whether their children’s tuition fees have been paid without necessarily disclosing the exact amount involved.
According to Sawyerr, the initiative is intended to provide parents with greater clarity about their children’s school fee payments while improving accountability within the student loan programme.
The development comes as the Federal Government continues to implement the scheme, which was established to ease financial barriers to tertiary education and enable eligible Nigerian students to pursue higher education.
Under the programme, NELFUND provides loans to cover institutional fees, while upkeep allowances are processed separately to help beneficiaries meet their living expenses.
The fund said it would also organise re-education workshops across the six geopolitical zones to explain changes to the payment system and address misunderstandings among students and participating institutions.
Sawyerr said the exercise would go beyond the usual awareness campaigns aimed at informing students about the availability of the loan scheme.
“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 explained that the proposed workshops would focus on ensuring that all stakeholders understood the revised procedures and their responsibilities under the scheme.
“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,” Sawyerr added.
He also appealed to the media to help communicate the changes to students nationwide, noting that the regional engagements might not reach everyone affected by the revised arrangements.
Meanwhile, NELFUND’s Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, explained that the fund had designed its payment infrastructure to reduce the involvement of intermediaries in transferring institutional fees.
Iyal said the system relied on students’ application identification numbers and wallet numbers for institutional payments rather than their personal bank account details.
“To be clear, we don’t use account numbers. We use their application ID and wallet number,” he said.
He explained that payments for tuition fees were processed separately from upkeep allowances, which were transferred to beneficiaries’ personal bank accounts through external payment channels.
According to him, NELFUND uses platforms such as NIBSS Instant Payments and Paystack to facilitate upkeep payments because the fund is not a banking institution and cannot open bank accounts for students.
He noted that transactions processed through external payment channels could sometimes experience delays, depending on the financial institutions involved.
Providing an update on the scale of the programme, Iyal said the payment system’s pilot phase involved approximately 400,000 students.
He disclosed that about 20,000 additional students had been recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing, while transactions were being processed for nearly 5,000 students daily.
Emphasising the number of beneficiaries involved, he said, “We are not talking about 20,000. No, we are talking about 400,000.”
Iyal further explained that the system used a tokenised arrangement linked to each student’s application identification number, with a wallet attached to the application.
He said the wallet used for upkeep allowances operated separately from the mechanism for processing payments to tertiary institutions.
The executive director also clarified that beneficiaries could already download receipts from the NELFUND portal after their school fees had been processed.
“Presently, on the NELFUND system, when they pay, they can download a receipt. We have that already,” he said.
However, he distinguished between receipts generated through the NELFUND platform and those issued by individual institutions, explaining that tertiary institutions maintained their own procedures for issuing receipts and providing clearance for departmental registration and other academic activities.
The fund said the ongoing adjustments and stakeholder engagements were intended to improve understanding of the student loan scheme, strengthen transparency in payments and ensure that beneficiaries and their parents clearly understood how tuition fees and upkeep allowances were handled.
