Africa-Press – Botswana. The Ministry of Education and Skills Development is currently undertaking a project to update academic and financial records of former beneficiaries’ files, to determine the total amount owed by former tertiary education students.
Education and Skills Development minister, Dr Douglas Letsholathebe informed Parliament on Monday that due to the scale of the operation, it was planned to complete in March 2025.
Dr Letsholathebe said because of the initial shortcomings of the manual sponsorship process employed for the tracking of tertiary education funding, it had not been easy to establish the exact amount owed to government by former loan beneficiaries.
He said the ministry commissioned a project to undertake the migration to a larger system, upgrading and enhancement of the Student Loan Management System in July 2019.
“The project is still ongoing and it is expected to provide seamless and cost effective operations and efficient services to customers including automation of payments,” Dr Letsholathebe stated.
He said education ministry was not lackadaisical in debt collection, adding that collection of debt was dependent on availability of financial records and employment details of beneficiaries.
“The Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) signed between the students and government stipulated that the students should inform government upon obtaining gainful employment in any sector of the economy, to enable government to recover the student loan,” he added.
He noted that the ministry was in the process of developing a Tertiary Education Student Financing Policy, which would include review of the MoA.
Regarding beneficiaries’ employment in the government sector, Dr Letsholathebe said they were tracked through the government payroll system while it remained a challenge with data collection from those employed in the private sector, parastatals and local authorities.
He added that the ministry did consider to engage a debt collection company in the past through a tender but it was cancelled because the ministry decided to build internal capacity to carry out the work.
He explained that there was no revenue collected from unemployed graduates, those on internship or in temporary employment because the ministry only targeted and collected from those that had been gainfully employed in any sector of the economy.
Member of Parliament for Serowe North, Mr Baratiwa Mathoothe had asked the minister state how much government was owed from student loans since the introduction of tertiary education funding in Botswana, why the ministry was lackadaisical in collecting debt and also to clarify what happened with the company that was engaged to do student debt collections.
Mr Mathoothe further wanted to know what happened to students who could not repay their loans due to the current high unemployment rate and if there was any enforcement clause in the contract signed with beneficiaries and how it was enforced for those who defaulted on loan repayments.
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