Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

At least Ksh210 billion will be required for university financing by 2028 under the new student-centred model.

Higher Education Loans Board (HELB), Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Charles Ringera has said that the loan component will require at least Sh145 billion while scholarship will need at least Ksh75 billion.

“Small simulation numbers that we have done show that by 2028 through this model, university financing will require Ksh145 billion from loans only. Scholarships will be looking at another around Ksh75 billion so we are talking about Ksh210 billion as the amount that will be required,” Ringera said in a media session on university funding.

“The sustainability of this new funding model is to have big entities that can be able to raise money outside of the Exchequer, which can be able to support the programme. In this simulation, I have looked at the candidature of Form Fours and how they are transiting to higher education and also the expansion of TVET. These are important numbers for planners of the country to understand what this model will be like so that we can start looking at sustainability,” the CEO explained.

To achieve sustainability, he said they have been looking for partnership funds through donors, foundations, individual corporate funders and counties among other stakeholders.

He said the perfect balance for HELB is when people repay the loans back, even as he stated that the future of the board in terms of expansion is to see how to stop reliance on the Exchequer and is able to raise a lot of funding to support higher education.

Last year, HELB had an allocation of Ksh11 billion, recovered about Ksh4.8 billion and the overall disbursed about Ksh14.9 billion to at least 800,000 students in TVET institutions and universities.

For this financial year, the available funding for institutions of higher learning is Ksh27.6 billion from HELB, another Ksh19.6 billion from the Universities Fund and Ksh4.6 billion from TVET.

The loan component covers tuition, books and stationery for the students, accommodation and subsistence upkeep allowance.

“There is an emerging issue post-Covid-19, which is the laptops. We are discussing with World Bank to test a device loan programme because the admission letters you have seen most of them are saying that the students should come with a laptop. In most universities, laptops are one of the key components and we are thinking of how to be able to cater for these as they get to universities,” he explained.

He said the country is coming out of the old funding model that was established in 1989 and is the source o of the Sh16,000 fees universities have been referring to.

The Ksh16,000 component is supposed to come from the 20 per cent of the Differentiated Unit Cost (DUC) that the households or HELB were supposed to give while grants were supposed to give 80 per cent.

Ringera explained that the purpose of the old funding formula was mainly on equality, as long as everybody had something and did not consider students’ status.

“The new funding formula tries to bring some equity and equality. This was necessary because the DUC and average loan has been decreasing and with the growth of students, it came down to 48 per cent last year and had we continued this way, we would have landed to 35 per cent this year,” he said.