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The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has announced plans to introduce a system that will allow parents to verify whether their children’s school fees have been paid through the government-backed student loan scheme.
The initiative is part of efforts to improve accountability and address cases of alleged double-dipping by students who receive loans from the fund while still relying on their parents to cover tuition costs.
NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this during a press briefing on Wednesday, saying the fund would no longer tolerate the practice.
“This comment is based on our recognition that there are so many students out there who are double-dipping. They are taking from the NELFUND and still stressing their parents,” Sawyerr said.
“We are going to put an end to that.”
Under the proposed arrangement, parents will be able to confirm whether NELFUND has paid their children’s tuition fees, although they may not have access to the specific amount involved.
Sawyerr said the measure was intended to reassure parents who continue to shoulder education expenses despite the availability of financial assistance through the student loan programme.
The fund also plans to organise re-education workshops across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones to explain changes to its payment procedures and address confusion among students, parents and tertiary institutions.
According to Sawyerr, the exercise will go beyond routine public awareness campaigns by providing detailed explanations of how the scheme operates, including the processing of institutional fees and upkeep allowances.
“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.
He said the workshops would clarify the procedures beneficiaries must follow and help reduce misunderstandings surrounding payments.
NELFUND Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, also explained the fund’s payment system, stating that institutional fees were processed using students’ application identification numbers and wallet numbers rather than conventional bank account numbers.
“To be clear, we don’t use account numbers. We use their application ID and wallet number,” Iyal said.
He explained that tuition payments and upkeep allowances were handled separately. While institutional charges were processed through NELFUND’s payment arrangement, upkeep allowances were transferred to students’ personal bank accounts through external payment platforms.
Iyal said the fund used channels such as NIBSS Instant Payments and Paystack to process upkeep allowances because NELFUND was not a banking institution and could not open bank accounts for beneficiaries.
He added that delays could sometimes occur due to the financial institutions involved in processing the transfers.
Providing an update on the payment system, Iyal said the pilot phase covered approximately 400,000 students, with about 20,000 additional students recorded between the previous week and the week of the briefing.
He also disclosed that the system processed transactions for nearly 5,000 students daily.
Explaining the scale of the operation, he said: “We are not talking about 20,000. No, we are talking about 400,000.”
Iyal further noted that each student’s application identification number was linked to a tokenised wallet, with the upkeep allowance wallet operating separately from the system used to process payments to institutions.
