Students and graduates can now repay loans from the Higher Education Loans Board using their cell phones. The phone option is among other initiatives aimed at making repayment easier and enhancing student loan recovery.

The board recently announced a partnership with mobile telephone service provider Zain Kenya which will enable student debtors to make payments from anywhere in the world through Zain's international money transfer system.

Chief Executive of the board, Benjamin Cheboi, said the innovation was aimed at enhancing the organisation's loan recovery portfolio and would "enable us to finance more Kenyans pursuing higher education". Cheboi said the board had developed a wide spectrum of loan recovery and repayment strategies.

One was strengthened cooperation with employers, resulting in more effective loan recovery through a check-off system. Others included introducing a direct debit facility for self-employed debtors, direct deposits into HELB bank accounts and use of credit or debit cards to service loans.

As a result the board hoped to enhance its performing loan portfolio from the current 55% to more than 70%. Cheboi said 33,000 students had fully repaid loans amounting to Kenyan shillings 2.4 billion (US$32 million) and 113,840 others were at various levels of servicing their loans.

In the last financial year, the board recovered KES1.6 billion - an increase of 20% on the previous year, with monthly loan recoveries now standing at an average of KES150 million.

Earlier this year, the board entered into a data-sharing partnership with Metropol East Africa to tackle the problem of student loan defaulters. Metropol collates information on the credit histories of beneficiaries of HELB loans and passes the information to banks. Students who fail to repay loans on completing their degrees could be barred from accessing loans from banks and other credit facilities.

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