Students aged under 18 risk missing out on university loans as deadline for application beckons

Fifteen days to go before the higher education funding portal closes, the students who are yet to receive their ID’s say the application process that requires them to input their ID numbers on the portal is complicating their applications. 

“The portal is lagging, you cannot access it, you have to sit and wait until maybe 2 or 3 am because during the day they’re many people accessing the portal and after the process, when you upload it doesn’t go to the next step, and then maybe you have applied for the scholarship haiendi, loan ndio inaenda tends

However the Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) says underage applicants will still be able to access scholarships but will wait for the loans until when they attain the age of 18. 

Access to the portal and swift execution of the application process isn’t the only bottleneck the hundreds of thousands of applicants are facing in accessing government funding for higher education. 

Some of the students hoping to join university and TVETs do not have identity cards on account of their age, and are facing the very real possibility of missing out on the loans for the first semester or year of study…Purity Kangai is here to plead her daughter’s case.

Purity’s case isn’t isolated. In Kisii, another family is facing the same predicament. Their son John Kerage, aged 17, is in tears as he watches his dreams of studying clinical medicine fade away. His family cannot afford to raise the Ksh.360,000 per year that the course costs, and had pegged their hopes on accessing. 

The higher education loans board however says no student, lack of ID notwithstanding will be locked out of accessing government funding. The agency’s CEO, Charles Ringera says those likely to be affected are not more than one thousand students

“…by the time they were sitting the KCSE exam, they were 2,200 students who did not have ID’s,” says Charles Ringera, CEO, HELB.

This group of students are eligible for both loans and scholarships, they will however access the scholarships first.

“The scholarship will be released to the universities, the loan component due to that student will be held back, until they supply the ID card, we know most of them are having waiting cards, but until that id is available on the iprs, they will not be able to get the money,” added Ringera.

Close to 60,000 applications for loans and scholarships have been received via the financing portal, out of the 280,000 who were placed in universities and TVETs.

HELB says it hasn’t achieved the critical mass required to start categorization of the applicants into the four bands of vulnerable, extremely needy, needy, and less needy, to determine the level of funding each will get.