The Higher Education Students Loans Board (HESLB) will soon start to trace thousands of defaulters to recover Sh285 billion in unpaid loans.
In Summary
The campaign will start next Monday and will involve tracing 119,497 defaulters who have already been identified.
“We have already notified our officials at zonal offices in Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma and Zanzibar to conduct similar inspections in their respective regions to make sure that this work is done efficiently,” said Mr Badru.
Dar es Salaam. The Higher Education Students Loans Board (HESLB) will soon start to trace thousands of defaulters to recover Sh285 billion in unpaid loans.
The campaign will start next Monday and will involve tracing 119,497 defaulters who have already been identified.
HESLB director general Abdul-razaq Badru said at a press conference yesterday that the exercise would last three months and would target all debtors who were granted loans since the 1994/95 academic year when the board started operations.
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In addition to tracing defaulters, HESLB will also start to audit payrolls of salaried staff countrywide to identify employers who were not submitting loan repayments.
“We are committed to ensuring that we crack down on all defaulters and employers who are not remitting their employees’ loan instalments. Our aim is to increase monthly collections from the current Sh13 billion to Sh17 billion by June 2018,” he said.
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He added that the law gave HESLB powers to conduct payroll audits and that it was a punishable offence for anyone to prevent such an audit.
“We have already notified our officials at zonal offices in Mwanza, Arusha, Dodoma and Zanzibar to conduct similar inspections in their respective regions to make sure that this work is done efficiently,” said Mr Badru.
Commenting on the status of loan collections, he said that until December 31, 2017, over Sh85 billion had been collected, adding that the board intended to have collected over Sh130 billion by June 30.
“In the past six months, we have identified 26,000 loan beneficiaries who have started repaying their loans. The total number of beneficiaries currently repaying loans is 121,000,” Mr Badru said and thanked all employers who were cooperating with the board.
He added that loans totalling Sh422.45 billion had so far been issued to 122,623 students in the current academic year.
At least Sh110.37 billion has been allocated to over 33,244 first-year students, while Sh312.16 billion has been allocated to 89,379 continuing students.
source: John Namkwahe @johnteck3 [email protected]