NELFUND pilots token payment to stop students paying school fees twice
- NELFUND has started piloting a tokenised system that lets students authorise loan payments directly to their schools.
- The fund says delayed notifications led some students to pay fees NELFUND had already settled, forcing refunds.
- Officials say close to 400,000 applications have been received, but gave no date for full rollout.
The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has begun testing a new way of paying school fees under its student loan scheme, aimed at stopping students from paying the same fees twice.
NELFUND Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr announced the pilot at a press briefing on Wednesday. Under the arrangement, students will use an app on their phones to authorise payments from their approved loans straight to their schools, instead of the money landing in their personal bank accounts.
The problem it targets is simple. Sometimes NELFUND pays a school, but the student does not hear about it in time and pays again to beat a registration deadline. That creates a need for refunds.
"We discovered that there were some issues with students being informed in good time that their payments had been made by NELFUND," Sawyerr said. He described the double payments as "a genuine error, no suspicion, no accusation."
How the token works
Students will get a notification when their approved fees are ready. They then press a button on their phone, and the money moves directly to the school named in their approval.
Sawyerr said the token cannot be sent to a student's personal account or to a different school. A student approved for ₦200,000, for example, can only push that money to the institution the loan was approved for.
"We're not giving the students money, but we're giving them power," he said.
NELFUND Executive Director Mustapha Iyal stressed that the token is not a wallet. "It's not a personal wallet, it's not a mobile money wallet at all," he said, explaining that each token is tied to one institution.
The change covers institutional charges only. Upkeep allowances will still be paid into students' bank accounts as before, according to the fund's existing guidelines.
Iyal said close to 400,000 applications had been received so far. That figure is the number of applications, not the number already processed through the pilot, and officials did not say when the system will be fully rolled out.
What happens next
The pilot will be watched closely, because its success depends on students, schools and NELFUND confirming payments quickly and keeping accurate records. For students, the hope is fewer refund battles and less risk of paying fees out of their own pockets when the loan has already cleared them.
The loan scheme was set up under the Students Loans (Access to Higher Education) Act, 2024, and offers eligible students interest-free loans for school charges and, where approved, upkeep.
