Students Loan Trust opens application portal

THE Students Loan Trust Fund (SLTF) has opened its online applications portal for students interested in securing loans under the ‘no guarantor’ system for the new academic year.

It has, therefore, urged students in various tertiary institutions, especially fresh students, to take advantage of the platform to apply for loans to facilitate their studies.

The Chief Executive Officer of the SLTF, Nana Kwaku Agyei Yeboah, disclosed this in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday.

Access

According to him, “tertiary students across the country will be able to access the students loan portal either through the organisation’s website or by downloading the Students Loan App”.

He said there were currently 32,744 beneficiaries in 110 tertiary institutions across the country on the fund.

Nana Yeboah said during the last academic year, the fund disbursed about GH¢64,650,000 in loans to 32,744 students.

“It is expected that more than 70,000 new applicants will access the loan for the 2023/2024 academic year,” he said.

In May last year, the fund had to pay the fees of 500 students of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi who were among 6,000 students who had been deferred for failing to pay their fees.

An amount of GH¢1m was paid to the university after the students had signed an undertaking for the fund to pay for both their first and second semester fees.

The 500 beneficiaries were among 2,188 others who had applied for the loans and been verified by the SLTF following their inability to pay their fees.

More than 6,000 students, representing about eight per cent of the 85,256 student population of the KNUST, were asked to defer their courses, in line with the university’s regulations on the non-payment of school fees.

Policy

The ‘no guarantor’ students loan policy was launched by the Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, last year.

Under the policy, a student only needs an admission letter and the Ghana Card to access the loan.

According to Nana Yeboah, the removal of the guarantor requirement would lead to an increase in the number of students desirous of accessing the loan.

He, therefore, encouraged students to take advantage of the new policy to access subsidised financing for their education.