Students to lose out as loans board misses targets

More than 113,953 eligible students will not get loans in the remainder of the current academic year, Kenya’s Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) has said after the strict measures it unveiled last year failed to jolt past beneficiaries to pay up, reports Lynet Igadwah for the Business Daily.

The agency, whose student funding budget for the year to June stands at KES15.5 billion (US$153 million), had hoped to recover KES4.9 billion from past loanees. “If the target of Sh4.9 billion is not achieved, a third of the 370,000 students in universities and technical and vocational education and training colleges will not get loans for the remaining part of 2019-2020,” Chief Executive Charles Ringera told the Business Daily.

Students from low income families rely heavily on the HELB loans and bursaries to finance their higher education. Failure to disburse their funds for the semester that starts next week implies that a number of students are likely to drop out during the academic year that ends in June. The state agency missed its half-year collections target by around KES100 million to collect KES2.2 billion against the KES2.3 billion target.
Full report on the Business Daily site