NELFund Reports Receiving Over 1,800 Student Loan Requests Each Day

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFund) has announced that more than 500,000 students are currently using its platform and benefiting from its loan program, with a daily average of 1,800 new loan requests.

This update was shared by the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of NELFund, Akintunde Sawyerr, on Tuesday in Abuja while addressing participants at the Stakeholders Engagement Session & Technical Workshop focused on NELFUND’s System Automation & Loan Application Processes.

Sawyerr explained that the stakeholder engagement was initiated due to the need to address certain identified issues in the loan application process.

He stated that the purpose of creating NELFund by the federal government extends beyond simply distributing loans but rather aims to create equal educational opportunities for every motivated Nigerian youth, irrespective of their origin, location, or academic focus.

Supporting the rationale behind the engagement, Sawyerr noted that many students, especially those in technical schools, have long encountered serious financial difficulties. Some are forced to abandon their studies, while others never apply at all.

“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.”

While discussing some of the existing issues and how they plan to address them, the NELFund chief stated, “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 Managing Director further clarified that the loan process is quite simple, as long as applicants follow the appropriate steps and provide correct academic details.

“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 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 checks.”

He also spoke about the number of loan participants so far, saying, “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, and we’re getting about 1,800 applications every single day.”