We must sustain Student Loan Trust Fund

It is globally accepted that a better and highly educated population is better disposed to contributing to rapid social development.

Therefore, many nations are placing a lot of premium on educating their populations, especially the youth, who are deemed to be the future leaders of any country.

Particularly in Ghana, the government is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that every child has the opportunity of going to school. It is currently rolling out the free senior high school policy for every qualified student.

But with limited resources that are being competed for by other sectors of the economy, governments are constrained in how much they can spend on education, much more on tertiary education.

The call has, therefore, been made over the years for cost sharing in higher education, with the different classes of society differing on the appropriate way to make governments, private entities, students and their families contribute to funding tertiary education, as well as the financial support that should be given students.

It was the outcome of such discussions, over the years, that led the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) to institute the students loan scheme which was a financial arrangement under which Ghanaian students pursuing approved courses in tertiary institutions in the country were granted loans to assist with the financing of their education.

The challenges with sustainability led SSNIT to discontinue the disbursement of its funds as loans, and the scheme was restructured into the Students Loan Trust Fund (SLTF), with funding from government sources, mainly the GETFund and other sources.

But the Daily Graphic is worried that one of the main challenges that faced the SSNIT students loan scheme, default in repayment, is once again threatening the sustainability and smooth running of the SLTF.

In yesterday’s edition of the Daily Graphic, we published on the front page the story of the huge number of graduates who had failed to honour their part of the loan bargain, with more than 55,000 people owing the SLTF about GHc75 million. While about 35,000 of the number had made some payments, a whopping 20,000 had not paid anything at all, with some of the debts dating as far back as 2012 when the first batch of beneficiaries took the loan in 2006.

The Daily Graphic sees this as very disturbing, as it seriously threatens the stability of the SLTF. We dare say that everything must be done to ensure that we get beneficiaries to service the loans, so that others who are coming into the system can also get the opportunity to be cushioned financially to reduce the burden on them as they go through their tertiary education.

We applaud the management of the SLTF for the measures so far taken to get some of the debtors to make good their obligations, but we understand that unlike the SSNIT loan scheme, the SLTF is essentially operated and managed by a private entity. For this reason, we urge the management of the fund to employ innovative measures to retrieve the money in debt.

We appreciate the fact that some of the debtors have not been able to meet their loan obligations because they have still not got employment after school. However, that may not be a tangible excuse, as those people should know that loans remain loans and should be paid as and when they fall due, whether one is working or not.

That is why we think it is also important that students who go for the loans are taken through their obligations for them to appreciate the need to work towards settling their debts when they are due.

The Daily Graphic also thinks that the SLTF can fall on the guarantors who, mostly, have personal relationships with the debtors, to help retrieve the money.

We reason that there are some who would genuinely pay if they had secured employment. That is why, as a country, we must all support initiatives that are meant to create employment for our teeming graduates, such as One-district, One-factory and Planting for Food and Jobs.

It is when we have managed to do this and got our graduates in employment that they can also meet their loan obligations to make the SLTF sustainable for others to also benefit from it.