Hundreds of would be loan scheme beneficiaries for the academic year 2023 will miss out on joining university following Higher Education Students Financing Board’s (HESFB) despairing announcement of the scheme’s halt.
HESFB announced Thursday that it will not receive applications for study loans for the academic year 2023/24, breaking hearts of prospective applicants who were hoping against hope that HESFB will foot their academic bill.
The board’s Executive Director Michael Wanyama said the halt is due to ‘budgetary shortfalls’ and that they (HESFB) are engaging all stakeholders in resource mobilization to resume supporting new cohorts in the academic year 2024/25.
Much as their is a will, there is no way HESFB board will finance financially struggling students when it is in the same sinking financial boat.
Hundreds of students have been benefiting from the loan scheme since its inception in 2014 and the board had registered about 13,000 beneficiaries by end of academic year 2022/33.
Last year, the board funded 120 continuing Students and also increased the beneficiary slots for those joining technical and vocational institutions as well as health training institutions, financially straining itself the more.
In February this year, the board said it was looking forward to collecting a whopping UGX 46 billion from the over 4000 loan scheme beneficiary graduates as a way of increasing its financial envelope.
The Board said it was being challenged by graduates who don’t want to repay their loans and uncooperative employers.
Graduates are given a grace period of 12 months after which they are given a period twice their study grace period to repay their loans. One has to remit not more or less than 30% of their monthly salary to the board till their loan is fully settled.
I will disagree with the board’s statement that graduates (some) do not want to repay their study loans. I doubt they are that ungrateful. Truth is, there’s nothing graduates can use to repay their study loans with.
Majority of Ugandan graduates are unemployed. Brighter Monday Uganda, a recruitment and HR platform quantified the unemployment rate of post secondary school graduates as of 2023 at 80%.
And may be HESFB needs to be told that this unemployment crisis equally affects loan scheme beneficiaries.
The brains behind HESFB assumed that within a year, loan scheme graduates would have got jobs to start repaying their loans. The key feature of an assumption is that it may or may not be truth, and in this case, it is the latter.
Government needs to address the employment crisis before it sends more students to school. There are over 50 higher institutions of learning in Uganda all together sending out about 40,000 graduates into the job market.
Whereas it is thumbs up for government’s efforts to educate Ugandans, it has done less in job creation. Museveni’s solution to the employment crisis has not changed since 2005 when I started making sense of television content. ‘Let the youth create their own jobs’ is wisdom that is not well thought-out.
HESFB funds largely science courses. Job creation in the scientific field is thrice expensive as is in the arts. It is irrational to assume that a graduate can be able to start up a sensible business in a Ugandan setting without working for a few years (if not for a lifetime) to generate start-up capital.
HESFB should have long thought of alternatives to ensure there is a steady financial flow without relying on payments from its beneficiaries. It is this myopic thinking that has made prospective applicants for the academic year 2023/24 miss out.
