NELFund to link website with school portals for easier student verification

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFund) has revealed plans to link its official website with those of beneficiary institutions for easy verification of students.

Mustapha Iyal, NELFund’s executive director of operations, addressed the difficulties experienced by students at a sensitisation programme in Ilorin.

Iyal said the fund will engage directly with institutions, allowing students to choose how to fund their education.

“We observed that one of the problems we are having is the problem of verification,” he said.

“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, so by doing that, when a student is trying to do registration 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.

“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.”

On his part, Umar Farouk, NANS representative on NELFund board, said the fund will encourage indigent students to have access to higher education.

“One of the campaign promises of the President 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 nobodies can now access higher education easily,” he said.

“With access to student’ loan, everyone now has the ease to go to school.”