More than 30,000 University Students may not receive this year education funding as the Higher Education Loans Board (Helb) website has crashed since last month.
Charles Ringera the Chief Executive of Helb said that the board knows about the challenges the students are facing as they seek to apply online through their website.
“We are rapidly working on an emergency solution to this challenge and we urge all our clients to bear with us,” he said.
Helb has been extending its submission deadlines since the hitch begun. The deadline is now at October 31 from September 15 which was an extension from August 31. Last month, Helb said that only 1,000 students had successfully applied for loans.
Annually, Helb give each undergraduate student between Ksh. 35,000 and Ksh.60,000 alongside a bursary of upto Ksh. 8,000, so at the end of four years they spend a minimum of Ksh. 140,000 and Ksh. 240,000 per student.
However, the hitch did not affect the continuing students as their deadline was July 31, before the website crashed.
The technical hitch adds to Helb’s financing problems as the Treasury has not allocated funds to the agency in tandem with the growth of university admissions.
Henry Rotich, the National Treasury secretary allocated Helb Sh4.9 billion in this year’s Budget. Helb has managed to recover about 2.5 billion shillings from past students pushing its total funds to Sh7.4 billion against a demand of Sh14.4 billion.
The situation must be taken care of as soon as possible otherwise many people may drop out of higher learning institution. There’re other complaints about the board send messages to people asking them to clear loans they have already settled. The board should put their house in order as they fix the website problem.