What is NELFUND SLAS?
In the context of Nigeria’s education fund, SLAS means the Student Loan Application System, digitised portal designed by NELFUND for public higher institutions in Nigeria to upload and verify the details of their students who applied for education loans.
Difference Between NELFUND Portal and SLAS Portal
While the NELFUND portal is designed exclusively for undergraduate students to submit their applications for education loans, the SLAS portal is designed for higher institutions to upload and verify the data of their students who applied for the loans before such loans can be disbursed.
How Does It Work?
Institutions that want their students to benefit from the interest-free loan will first have to be onboarded onto the SLAS portal by sending an access request to registration (at) nelf.gov.ng.
Once granted access, they will be able to verify and upload their students’ data on the portal.
Institutions will also be able to view a real-time dashboard of their students’ loan applications, verify submitted data, and track the status of each application.
This means that even if a student applies for a loan through the NELFUND portal, but their institution fails to upload and verify their data on the SLAS portal, the student will not be able to receive the loan.
Furthermore, even if NELFUND verifies the student, the institution must still verify the student’s details on the SLAS portal. If not, the government will not disburse the loan to the student.
If your status on the portal shows “verified”, and your institution has confirmed your details, your status will be updated to “disbursed” once the payment of your fees has been processed.
According to the Director, Strategic Communications of NELFUND, Mrs. Oseyemi Oluwatuyi, “if students loan portal status currently showed ‘Verified’, this means that the student application had successfully passed initial checks, but the final approval and disbursement are subject to confirmation and upload of students data by the institution.”
Benefits
- To ensure timely processing and disbursement of approved student loans.
- To minimize sharp practices by Nigerian institutions that take a cut from the loans meant for students.
- To streamline the loan processing experience for both institutions and applicants.
- To eliminate discrepancies between what students claim as their tuition fees and what the institution claims as extra charges.
We hope that the upgrade of SLAS by NELFUND will reduce complaints from students that their institutions intentionally withhold or delay the disbursement of their loans.
A Series of SLASs
You may have probably read about the Student Learning Assistance System (SLAS), Student Loan Application Support (SLAS), and now, Nigeria has added another SLAS to the list of student-related programmes sharing the same acronym, with the recent unveiling of the Student Loan Application System (SLAS).
While the Student Learning Assistance System (SLAS) is a student support program used to determine students’ eligibility for access to the University of the Philippines learning platform, Student Loan Application Support is used by applicants of Aerocadet, a U.S.-based aviation training institution.
So when you come across “SLAS”, it is very important to consider the context and geographic usage of the acronym.
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