The Nigerian Education Loan Fund, NELFUND, has announced plans to launch a centralized job portal in 2026 aimed at giving student loan beneficiaries early access to employment opportunities in Nigeria and abroad.
This was disclosed by the agency’s Managing Director, Mr. Akintunde Sawyerr, during a media engagement in Abuja on Thursday, marking one year since the student loan scheme was inaugurated.
Sawyerr clarified that while NELFUND cannot guarantee jobs, the job portal is being developed to serve as a bridge between graduates and potential employers.
“We don’t just give a loan and leave students on their own. This job portal is our way of supporting their journey towards economic stability,” he said.
The portal will aggregate job listings from both the public and private sectors, as well as international organizations looking to hire Nigerian talent.
NELFUND believes this initiative will give students an advantage in a competitive job market, aligning financial support with career readiness.
Addressing concerns around loan repayment, Sawyerr emphasized that repayment will not begin until a graduate secures employment. He noted that the loan system is designed to be empathetic and responsive to economic realities.
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“If you don’t have a job, you don’t pay. And when you eventually get a job, your repayment starts fresh,” he explained.
According to NELFUND’s repayment model, once a beneficiary is employed, 10 percent of their monthly income will be automatically deducted by their employer and remitted to the Fund. These deductions will be verified through a dedicated NELFUND employment register.
The deductions pause automatically in cases of job loss or resignation, and in the unfortunate event of a beneficiary’s death, the loan is written off with no obligations passed to the family.
On issues surrounding double payments, Sawyerr called on educational institutions to return fees to students who had paid independently before NELFUND’s disbursement reached their schools.
“We’ve received multiple petitions from students who paid under duress only to find their fees had also been paid by NELFUND,” he said.
He stressed that institutions have both a moral and professional duty to return the excess fees to students and revealed that anti-graft agencies like the EFCC and ICPC are already investigating schools that have failed to comply.
Institutions unwilling to refund students directly can instead return the funds to NELFUND for onward disbursement.
Speaking on the Fund’s operational scope, NELFUND’s Executive Director of Operations, Mustapha Iyal, revealed that the agency is currently managing data for over 3.2 million students nationwide. He projected that an additional one million applications could be processed by the end of 2025.
“Our aim is to ensure that no student drops out of school due to financial hardship,” Iyal said. He added that while the figure is not mandatory, the agency is working proactively to scale access and improve educational outcomes across the country.
NAN
