Nana Kwaku Agyei Yeboah, Chief Executive Officer of SLTF
A total of GHC12 million has been released by Government through the Students Loan Trust Fund (SLTF) as loans to students in tertiary institutions across the country.
Some 10,000 students from 148 tertiary institutions across the country will be benefitting from the funds released on Friday.
This is the first payment being made after the official launching of the “No Guarantor Loan Scheme” on June 9, 2022.
Chief Executive Officer of SLTF, Nana Kwaku Agyei Yeboah, who disclosed this to the media in Accra on Friday said, the amount covers payment to only first-time applicants for the first semester of the year.
First-time applicants from the University of Education, Winneba recorded 1523 as the highest recipients, followed by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) which had 787, the University of Ghana had 511, with Koforidua Technical University recording 488 students and Takoradi Technical University with 371 respectively.
He stated that the lowest amount received by each student ranged from GHC1500 being the lowest and GHC3000 as the highest depending on the needs of the students after a means-testing assessment by the SLTF before disbursement to the students.
Nana Agyei Yeboah said the payment would go a long way to ease the burden of students as they continue their education on various campuses across the country.
The CEO explained that all continuing students who are beneficiaries of the Students Loan Scheme in the country were paid in March this year.
He stated that everything possible would be done to ensure that payment of funds to students would be made timeously to the beneficiaries to ensure that the students do not have challenges with funding.
Nana Agyei Yeboah appealed to beneficiaries to ensure that they voluntarily pay back their loans to ensure that the government gets enough funds at all times to run the scheme for the benefit of others.
The CEO said the only people who have so far not been paid were those who have applied but have not completed the submission of the required information to the scheme and urged them to expedite action in the completion of their documentation and take their biometrics so they could be paid.
He appealed to those who have not yet applied to the scheme to do so since they could also benefit from the loan which was readily available to all qualified students irrespective of political, social, religious and ethnic orientation.
The difficulties involved in getting people to guarantee for students loans applicants used to be a major challenge to many students in tertiary institutions in the country.
This prompted the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led government to introduce the No Guarantor scheme to ensure that tertiary students are able to secure loans to support their education without much difficulty.
Many Ghanaians have commended the government for the successful rolling out of the no guarantor scheme which had brought about much relief to students, parents and the institutions of study.
To ensure that beneficiaries received their funds without much challenges, they are required to have E-zwich cards (a smartcard issued by the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement System Limited (GhIPSS) for easy payment.
By Vincent Kubi