113,953 Students to Drop Out as HELB Reports Shortage of Funds

Over 113,953 eligible students will not access student loans in their remaining current academic year according to the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) as it is running short of funds.

HELB has noted that all its attempts to recover money from past beneficiaries have failed as they have refused to pay up or even commit to a process of repaying the loans they accumulated in their studies.

HELB has noted that it hoped to recover at least 4.9 billion shillings from its past beneficiaries to enable its current annual budget of 15.5 billion shillings.

“If the target of 4.9 billion shillings is not achieved, a third of the 370,000 students in universities and technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges will not get loans for remaining part of the 2019/2020,” chief executive (CEO) Charles Ringera said.

HELB’s failure or inability to disburse the academic funds will greatly affect low-income families who fully depend on bursaries and HELB to finance their studies.

The semester is set to start in a week’s time and the news of HELB not sending in finances for all the students means a number of students are likely to either default or drop out for lack of finances.

HELB collected 2.2 billion shillings instead of the 2.3 billion shillings it was targeting from its previous beneficiaries.

HELB beneficiaries who are defaulting and not visiting the offices to come up with a pay-up plan have been blamed for the current financial struggle that is to see over 100,000 students drop their courses.

HELB relies on its previous beneficiaries to repay their student loans to enable them to financially support incoming students who cannot afford the fees on condition that they will repay once done with the studies.

HELB has been pursuing 78,328 loan defaulters yet to pay up an accumulative 7.7 billion shillings as of 31^st December 2019 despite a myriad of threats that included having their faces published on local dailies.

HELB defaulters are already blacklisted with the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) making it difficult for them to access loans with banks and if unemployed, then their fate remains unknown.

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