Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFund) is set to move beyond simply financing university and other tertiary education courses by increasingly linking student funding to skills in demand and employment opportunities in the Nigerian economy, its Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Mr Akintunde Sawyerr, has said.
Sawyerr said the Fund was studying the courses being funded and the employment prospects available to graduates as part of a broader effort to ensure that government’s investment in student education produces skills required by the economy.
He disclosed this on Channels Television’s Politics Today, saying NELFund was now beginning to analyse the growing demand for its loans and determine whether the courses being financed correspond with Nigeria’s future workforce needs.
“As we move forward, as we see how the demand is growing, we are now starting to analyse the figures. We are starting to try to understand what it is we are paying for,” he said.
According to him, the Federal Government’s wider education reforms, including efforts to set standards, strengthen accreditation and determine the courses required for national development, would influence the direction of NELFund’s funding.
“We will fit into that scheme and fund, alongside those initiatives, the actual programmes that are going to make a difference in Nigeria,” he said.
Sawyerr said the Fund would increasingly ask two critical questions: “What sort of jobs are available? What sort of skills are required to get those jobs?”
He stressed that the intention was not to continue financing tertiary education without considering what happens to beneficiaries after graduation.
“We are not just going to be paying for courses going forward,” he said.
The NELFund chief said the student-loan model itself could encourage beneficiaries to think more carefully about the courses and institutions they choose because they would eventually be required to repay the money.
“If you have to pay back money for something that you have borrowed, you are likely to be more considered about the course you are going to take,” he said.
“You are likely to look more closely into what sort of job opportunities there are thereafter.”
He said this could ultimately encourage students to pursue programmes with stronger employment prospects while creating competition among tertiary institutions to attract students whose education is being financed through NELFund.
“One of the other things you are going to see over time—and this doesn’t happen overnight—is competition between institutions to attract the funding that NELFund is backing students with,” Sawyerr said.
The Fund’s planned shift toward employability comes as NELFund records rapidly growing demand for its intervention.
Sawyerr said the Fund had received about 1.8 million applications, of which 1.659 million had been processed, with just under one million students becoming beneficiaries.
