Nairobi — The Ministry of Education has given assurance that no first-year student will be turned away from admission commencing next week due to lack of fees when higher learning institution reopen.
Education Cabinet Secretary Ezekiel Machogu allayed fears that students will fail to join universities and TVETs as the government is yet to disburse the government scholarship and loans.
Appearing before the National Assembly Education Committee, Machogu committed that his Ministry will be writing a circular to all public and private universities to admit students with admission letters.
"Treasury is giving us funds for 2nd,3rd and fourth years which will be disbursed to universities as we are concluding the process of categorization for the 1st year students. We have made it clear to our public and private university no to turn away students while we are doing the processing funding," said Machogu.
Lawmakers had raised concerns that the students will be turned away from joining universities and TVETs since the process of categorization and disbursement of scholarship and loans had not been completed.
MPs had demanded the government to suspends the new university funding formula at least for students joining the institutions in September citing lack of awareness and public participation.
This is at emerged that only thirty percent of students have successfully made applications to government funding to enroll to universities and TVETs with technical hitches impeding the speedy applications.
Education Ministry has moved to seek assistance from the Ministry of Interior and Administration to help in fast tracking the application ahead of the deadline slated for September 7th.
As of Thursday, 75,272 students out of 285,000 enrolled in universities and TVETs had successfully made their application.
"We have been able to analyze this because we have had some sort of problem. The system has some kind of jam such that we apply and the system is not able to absorb. The validation process has also had challenges," Machogu said.
Machogu explained that the government might extend the deadline of application pending on the number of applications which will have been successfully done by the deadline.
He insisted that his docket will ensure that no student is locked out from the government funding due to technicalities emphasizing its commitment supporting higher education students especially from vulnerable households.
"We will not like to lock out any person, and if you have an application you can just report in university and be guided on how to apply, we will be quite flexible because as you can see the numbers are still low," he said.
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The funding model only applies to KCSE 2022 candidates who will have to make their applications on the Higher Education Financing (HEF) portal; www.hef.co.ke.
Students will be awarded scholarships, loans and bursaries based after a Means Testing Instrument (MTI) methodology that intends to determine their level of need.
In the new model, students have been categorised into four groups based on their level of financial need.These are vulnerable, very needy, needy and less needy students.
According to the plan, vulnerable students will get 82 per cent government scholarship and 18 per cent loan from Higher Education Loans Board.
For the very needy students, government scholarship will account for 70 per cent as Helb caters for 30 per cent.
Needy students will get a government scholarship of 53 percent and Helb loan 40 of per cent.Households will have to contribute seven per cent.
The less needy students will get a government scholarship of 38 per cent, Helb 55 per cent while their households contribute seven per cent.
