The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) is planning to introduce an online portal that will enable parents to verify whether their children’s tuition fees have been paid under the student loan scheme.
Gatekeepers News reports that the proposed platform will allow parents to enter their children’s matriculation numbers to check payment status, without revealing the amount paid or other sensitive financial information.
NELFUND Managing Director and Chief Executive, Akintunde Sawyerr, disclosed this at a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday, explaining that the initiative was designed to prevent students from collecting tuition fees from both the Fund and their parents.
He said the portal would address cases in which students whose school fees had already been covered by NELFUND continued to request money from their families without disclosing that they had received financial support.
“This development is based on us recognising that there are still many students out there who are double dipping; they’re taking from NELFUND and still stressing their parents. So we’re going to put an end to that,” Sawyerr said.
The initiative comes amid concerns raised in August by the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, who suggested that some students might have benefited from the scheme without their parents’ knowledge.
Oyedele made the observation while responding to an audience member who said his three children in tertiary institutions had yet to benefit from the programme and that he was unaware of any of their friends who had received the financial support.
Sawyerr said the proposed portal would help bridge the information gap between students and their parents while safeguarding beneficiaries’ financial privacy.
NELFUND introduces digital wallet for tuition payments
In a related development, the Fund is introducing a restricted digital wallet system that will enable students to authorise the payment of approved tuition fees directly to their institutions.
Under the proposed arrangement, approved fees will be credited to a digital wallet linked to the beneficiary’s institution. Students will then use their phones to authorise payments without receiving the money in cash or having it transferred into their personal bank accounts.
Sawyerr said the system would help prevent the diversion of tuition funds because each digital token would be linked to a specific institution and could only be used to pay the designated school.
He explained that the existing payment arrangement, under which NELFUND remits fees directly to institutions after verifying applications, had sometimes resulted in duplicate payments.
According to him, some students, unaware that the Fund had already settled their tuition fees, made separate payments to meet school deadlines, only to discover later that NELFUND had paid the same bills.
“We’re placing the power for payment in the hands of the students. The power for payment to the institution is going to now be walletised so that they can click on their phone and the institution can be paid,” he said.
He stressed that the system would not give students access to cash but would allow them to determine when approved tuition fees were paid to their institutions.
“They never see the cash. It’s a walletised, or some people might call it a tokenised system. We’re not giving the students money, but we’re giving them power,” he added.
NELFUND Executive Director, Mustapha Iyal, said the wallet-based payment system was undergoing pilot implementation, with more than 400,000 applications in the system at the time of the briefing.
Iyal explained that the digital token would be linked to a specific institution rather than a personal or mobile money wallet, ensuring that the funds could only be used for their intended purpose.
He said the new arrangement was expected to take effect in the 2026/2027 academic session, adding that the Fund was working to ensure that institutions acknowledged payments promptly and students received timely notifications.
Under the proposed process, once a student authorises a payment, the institution will receive the money directly into its account. The student can subsequently obtain a receipt from the institution’s bursary or finance department.
Iyal advised students to apply for loans early rather than waiting until examination periods or payment deadlines, warning that late applications could lead to avoidable payment complications.
NELFUND plans regional workshops as applications grow
Sawyerr also announced plans to organise two-day regional workshops across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones to prepare tertiary institutions, students and other stakeholders for the implementation of the upgraded NELFUND 2.0 application system.
The workshops will bring together institutional heads, bursars, information technology administrators, students and community representatives to strengthen application processing, verification, technical readiness and public awareness.
The expected outcomes include better-trained institutional teams, improved application and verification procedures, faster processing of student applications and stronger regional support networks.
Sawyerr said the engagements had become necessary as growing awareness of the scheme continued to drive demand for student loans.
He disclosed that NELFUND had more than one million beneficiaries and projected that applications could rise significantly, potentially reaching two million. He clarified, however, that the figure referred to applications rather than an increase in available funding.
According to him, the Fund was strengthening its technology, administrative processes and institutional support systems to manage the anticipated demand.
Sawyerr commended President Bola Tinubu for supporting the student loan scheme, which he said was helping to expand access to financial assistance for students in tertiary institutions.
