AfricaPress-Tanzania: HIGHER Education Students’ Loan Board (HESLB) has opened an online loan application system to allow students who completed the National Service (JKT) training recently to apply for loans.
According to HESLB, the system will be open for five days from today to next Monday, to provide room for needy and eligible applicants to apply for loans and finalise the processes within the given time.
The Board’s Executive Director, Mr Abdul-Razaq Badru said in a statement issued to the media that the decision followed requests the board had received from several students, parents and guardians to allow students who could not apply for loans especially those who were attending JKT training to do so.
Mr Badru further noted that the opening of the system will also help applicants whose applications had shortfalls to correct them and attach appropriate documents to allow HESLB proceed with other steps.
“For those who are correcting their information, they are supposed to use their accounts they had opened for loan application and they will receive a message on areas which need to be corrected … I urge them to use these five days to complete their applications,” he said.
The government, through HESLB, has set aside 464bn/- for 2020/2021 academic year for 145,000 beneficiaries, of whom 54,000 will be first year students and 91,000 for continuing students.
In 2019/2020, the government set aside 450bn/- for 132,119 beneficiaries.
On September 10th, this year, HESLB closed the loan application window for Academic Year 2020/2021 after extending the deadline for ten days.
The board had extended the application period to provide room for applicants who have not completed their loan application processes to do so.
Initially, the window which was opened on July 21, this year, was to close on August 31, but the board extended the deadline following requests by parents, guardians and students to allow the applicants to complete lodging their applications.
Mr Badru said that after closing the system, new applicants will not have access to the system except for 7,500 applicants whose applications were still online and have not completed the application procedures.
He said HESLB was expecting to start sorting out the applications early last month and later release the list of all applications which will not have been filled correctly and allow the applicants to rectify them.
