Akintunde Sawyerr, the agency’s managing director, was at a strategic engagement and sensitisation campaign in Enugu on Thursday.

The campaign, which featured local dialects, was to educate heads of institutions and other stakeholders about the fund’s activities.

While stressing the priority to address the needs of students in public universities and colleges first, Sawyerr explained that the long-term objective is to provide financial support to all Nigerian students, regardless of the type of institution they attend.

“We have only been going for one year. We need to address the public sector first,” he said.

“These loans allow students to otherwise drop out for very small amounts of money.

“The students that we see in the public sector don’t even have the option, in most cases, to go to the private sector, and some of them are dropping out.

“So we want to address that, make sure that we’ve got them covered.

“And then when we see after a while, I think two, three years max, when we see the effect this has had on the generality of youth in Nigeria, we can then do some sort of review to see what it might mean for moving to the private sector segment.”

Sawyerr acknowledged challenges such as misinformation and distrust among potential applicants.

He assured that NELFund is committed to assisting students and institutions through the application process.

“The only challenges the Fund has are the usual ones, which include misunderstanding, misinformation, people not being sure, or feeling that it’s designed not to work for them or that something is stopping them.

“They just have a normal problem like everybody else has with technology, and then they say, this has been rigged against us. But we’re here. We’re not here to waste our time. We’re here to help the people apply and get institutions to also take part.”

Also speaking at the event, Chinyere Onyeisi, special adviser to the Enugu state governor on education innovation, highlighted the importance of the loan scheme for students in the southeast.

“There is a need for loans because education is a very vast area that requires a lot of attention. What the government is doing has an essential role to play in different areas of education,” she said.