HELB loans: More than 113,953 eligible students will not get HELB loans in the remainder of the current academic year.
This has been declared by the Higher Education Loans Board. The failure to allocate loans follows what HELB has termed as failure to get repayments from previous beneficiaries.
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“If the target of Sh. 4.9 billion 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 Charles Ringera told the Nation Media’s Business Daily newspaper.
The newspaper further reports that the failure to disburse their funds for 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 Sh. 100 million to collect Sh. 2.2 billion against the Sh. 2.3 billion target. Helb is supposed to be a revolving fund where beneficiaries who have finished their studies pay back the loans to support a fresh group of students. The agency said it is pursuing some 78,328 loan defaulters holding Sh. 7.7 billion as at December 31 last year. The past beneficiaries have not responded despite frequent threats of prosecution, credit bureau listings and deployment of specialised debt recovery agents,” the newspaper says.