The Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND, has announced plans to clamp down on alleged double-dipping by students who benefit from its loan scheme while still relying on their parents to pay their school fees.
The move signals a fresh effort to strengthen accountability in the implementation of the Federal Government’s student loan programme. It will also provide parents with a mechanism to verify whether their children’s tuition fees have been paid through the scheme.
NELFUND Managing Director, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this during a press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday. He said the fund had identified cases of students allegedly accessing loan support while continuing to place the burden of tuition payments on their parents.
Describing the practice as unacceptable, Sawyerr said NELFUND was determined to end it and improve transparency in the administration of the scheme.
“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,” he said.
“We are going to put an end to that.”
Under the proposed arrangement, parents will be able to confirm whether their children’s school fees have been paid through NELFUND without necessarily having access to the actual amount involved.
Sawyerr said the initiative was intended to address concerns among parents who continue to shoulder the financial responsibilities of their children’s education despite the availability of government-backed loans.
The development comes as the Federal Government intensifies efforts to expand access to tertiary education through the student loan programme. The scheme is designed to ease financial barriers and prevent eligible students from being denied higher education because of their inability to pay institutional fees upfront.
Under the arrangement, NELFUND provides loans for institutional charges, while upkeep allowances are processed separately to assist beneficiaries with their living expenses.
However, the fund’s latest intervention suggests that ensuring students understand the payment process, alongside preventing potential abuse, has become a priority as the scheme expands.
To address gaps in understanding and clarify revised procedures, NELFUND will organise re-education workshops across the six geopolitical zones of the country.
Sawyerr explained that the exercise would go beyond the fund’s routine public awareness campaigns, which primarily inform students about the availability of the loan scheme.
According to him, the new engagements will focus on educating students, parents and tertiary institutions on how the payment system works and the changes introduced to improve its administration.
“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.
The managing director said the workshops would help eliminate confusion surrounding institutional payments, upkeep allowances and the documentation required by beneficiaries.
He also indicated that journalists might be invited to some of the engagements to observe the exercise and help communicate the changes to a wider audience.
Sawyerr urged the media to support the information campaign, noting that the regional workshops alone might not reach every student who needed clarification.
Meanwhile, NELFUND’s Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, provided further insight into the fund’s payment architecture, explaining that the system was designed to minimise intermediaries in the transfer of institutional fees.
Iyal said the fund relied on students’ application identification numbers and wallet numbers for institutional payment processing, rather than their conventional 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 and upkeep allowances followed separate payment processes. Tuition payments are handled through the fund’s institutional payment arrangement, while upkeep allowances are transferred to students’ personal bank accounts through external payment channels.
According to him, NELFUND uses platforms such as NIBSS Instant Payments and Paystack to process upkeep payments because the fund is not a banking institution and cannot open bank accounts for beneficiaries.
He said the involvement of external payment channels could sometimes lead to delays, depending on the financial institutions handling the transactions.
Providing an update on the scale of the payment system, Iyal disclosed that the pilot phase covered 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 nearly 5,000 students daily.
“We are not talking about 20,000. No, we are talking about 400,000,” he said, emphasising the scale of the operation.
Iyal further explained that the system employed 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 to process institutional payments, underscoring the distinction between money paid directly to schools and allowances transferred to students.
The proposed verification mechanism is expected to give parents greater confidence in the scheme and discourage misuse of loan funds. It may also help NELFUND identify students who receive tuition support while their families continue to pay fees directly to institutions.
As the student loan programme expands, the fund says it will continue to strengthen its payment systems, improve stakeholder education and ensure that the loans reach the students who genuinely need them.