The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has announced plans to prevent students from benefiting from its loan scheme while still relying on their parents to pay their school fees.
The Managing Director of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this during a press briefing on Wednesday, saying the fund had identified cases of students allegedly receiving support through the scheme while their parents continued to bear the cost of their education.
Sawyerr said the development had prompted the fund to strengthen its payment system and introduce measures to ensure greater transparency in the administration of the student loan scheme.
He said the fund was determined to put an end to what he described as double-dipping by students who receive loans but still depend on their parents to pay their tuition fees.
“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.
He added, “We are going to put an end to that.”
According to Sawyerr, NELFUND plans to introduce a system that will enable parents to confirm whether their children’s school fees have been paid through the scheme without necessarily having access to the amount involved.
The measure is expected to provide parents with clarity while ensuring that the loan scheme operates in a transparent manner.
The Federal Government introduced the student loan programme to reduce financial barriers to tertiary education and enable eligible Nigerian students to pursue higher education without the immediate burden of paying school fees.
Under the scheme, NELFUND provides loans for institutional fees, while upkeep allowances are processed separately to support students’ living expenses.
The fund is now seeking to improve stakeholders’ understanding of how the payment system works, particularly the distinction between institutional fees and upkeep allowances.
Sawyerr said NELFUND would organise re-education workshops across the six geopolitical zones to explain the changes and address misunderstandings among students, parents and tertiary institutions.
He explained that the exercise would go beyond the fund’s usual sensitisation programmes, which primarily inform 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.
“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 said the workshops would help students and institutions understand the revised payment processes and ensure that beneficiaries were properly informed.
The fund may also invite journalists to some of the engagements to observe the exercise.
Sawyerr urged the media to help disseminate information about the changes, noting that the workshops might not reach every student who needed the information.
Meanwhile, NELFUND’s Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, explained that the fund had designed its payment system to minimise the involvement of intermediaries in the transfer of institutional fees.
Iyal said the fund used students’ application identification numbers and wallet numbers for institutional payment processes rather than 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 institutional fees were processed separately from upkeep allowances, which were transferred to students’ personal bank accounts through payment channels.
According to him, NELFUND uses systems such as NIBSS Instant Payments and Paystack to process upkeep allowances because the fund is not a banking institution and cannot provide students with bank accounts.
He said the use of external payment channels could sometimes result in delays, depending on the financial institutions involved.
Iyal disclosed that the pilot phase of the payment system involved about 400,000 students, with approximately 20,000 additional students recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing.
He added that the system processed transactions for almost 5,000 students daily.
The executive director explained that the fund’s payment system operated through a tokenised 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 for institutional payments.
Iyal also clarified that students could already download receipts from the NELFUND platform after their school fees had been processed.
However, he noted that receipts generated by the fund were different from those issued by individual institutions, which maintained their own systems for issuing receipts and clearance documents required for departmental registration and other academic processes.
“Presently, on the NELFUND system, when they pay, they can download a receipt. We have that already,” he said.
The latest development comes as NELFUND continues to implement the Federal Government’s student loan scheme, with efforts focused on improving transparency, streamlining payments and ensuring that students and institutions understand the processes involved.
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