He said other successful applicants won’t begin to receive credit alerts until the commencement of academic sessions in their respective institutions.

The people who are going to first receive alerts as early as next week are the people who are about to start a new session in the institution they are in, said the NELFUND Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr.

Sawyerr’s comment came hours after President Bola Tinubu ushered in the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) at the State House in Abuja. He said 170,000 applicants from universities, polytechnics and colleges of education now have accounts with NELFUND but 110,000 applicants have completed the process.

Sawyerr said there are two types of beneficiaries – the first being the institutions that would get paid on behalf of those who have successfully applied to go to those institutions; and the second are the applicants – the students themselves who would receive a monthly stipend.

“To be precise, about 110,000 students have successfully applied. They’ve put in their applications and verified as being bona fide and eligible applicants. But we’ll still carry out further verification to make sure they are well-qualified to receive these loans. But over 110,000 are likely to begin to receive disbursement from next week,” he said.

Sawyerr said each of the applicants must have Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) numbers, matric numbers, Bank Verification Numbers (BVN), and National Identification Numbers (NIN), among other requirements.

“Current exposure to students is about N35bn. We’ve got much more than that sitting in our accounts that we can disburse, and we’ve also got some funding on the way. Remember, we are getting 1% of Federal Inland Revenue Service taxes and we also can receive funding from other sources,” Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr said.

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