Executive director Abdulrazak Badru disclosed this yesterday in Dar es Salaam where he revealed an increase in the repayment of loans from graduates.
“We have managed to collect Sh130bn in a period of nine months in the 2017/2018 financial year, up from Sh28bn we collected the previous year,” he said.
He told the HESLB labour council that in the 2018/2019 financial year the government has allocated Sh427bn in student loans to be issued to 120,000 students.
According to him, the pace of collecting matured loans from beneficiaries had increased tremendously, saying the board had already completed the procedure for issuing loans to diploma students, the procedure for which will be announced at the end of this month.
Badru said the government, through HESLB, has successfully increased the number of loan beneficiaries from 28,383 first year students in 2016/2017 to 33,941 students this 2017/2018 financial year.
Earlier, permanent secretary in the ministry Education, Science, Technology and Vocational Training Dr Leonard Akwilapo told HESLB staff to work had, embrace integrity and cooperation if they wanted to achieve.
The PS directed the labour council to ensure there was discipline and ethical conduct at the workplace.
The PS also congratulated them for good work in collecting loans effectively.
“A performance audit on the management of payment and recovery of Higher Education Student Loans by the Controller and Auditor General (CAG) states that HESLB had 163,394 loan defaulters, but the board’s records indicate that there were only 18 individual defaulters,” the PS said.
Only two individual defaulters have been arraigned in court during the past two years.
It stated that, there were 70 employers who were charged with late payment or non-deduction penalties.
The total penalties for all the 70 employers amounted to Sh267.5million. However, HESLB managed to collect 21 per cent of the penalties from employers totaling Sh57million, according to the report.
According to data analysis from HESLB over a five-year period by March last year, two in three students who applied for a loan in 2016/17 missed it, the highest figure to be recorded.
However, the government stressed that the funds were for needy Tanzanian students and not everyone who applied would get them.
It insists that education financing is exclusively the responsibility of parents and guardians, a trend which forced a significant of students from poor backgrounds to drop out or postpone their studies as they looked for other sources of funds.
By 2012/13, the number of students accessing loans increased almost every year, with an average of three out of 10 applicants missing out, which has since changed.
