The Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) has bowed to pressure and started disbursing funds to a number of students who had applied.
This comes after the Chief finance officer of the state corporation, Mary Wachira pronounced the institution bankrupt.
The funds will be released in batched for students who had applied for the loan.
“Tangazo! Tangazo! Tangazo! The following tuition batches have been disbursed to your institutions, 003823, 003819, 003874, 003851,003857 and 003875,” said HELB in a tweet.
The stalemate had put at risk more than 75,000 new university students who could have failed to join college after they applied for funds in September last year.
“Right now, we have 75,000 first-year students that are yet to be funded and we require Ksh.3 billion to process their applications,” said Wachira when she appeared before the National Assembly Committee on Education during the review of the national budget.
She added that the funding is insufficient and that a good number of students would miss out on the state loan.
“We need about Ksh.3 billion just to allocate them the minimum amount, the amount is too low compared to the Ksh.200,000 required by the students per year,” added the finance officer.
Embakasi East Member of Parliament Babu Owino had threatened the board that he would mobilize the students to demonstrate if the funds were not released with a seven-day ultimatum.
“We have decided that on Thursday we shall hold a mother of all demonstrations in this country, and it is better imagined than experienced because all roads will be closed,” said the MP as he urged the students to organize themselves in large numbers for the demonstration.
However, learners reacted to the tweet by saying that a big number of them had not received their money while others had a change of the batch numbers that had been previously allocated.
Last December, HELB said it had reduced the average amount offered to students for loans from about Ksh.45,000 to Ksh.37,000 against a student’s annual budget of about Ksh.200,000.
