The Students Loan Trust Fund (SLTF) has begun a public sensitisation campaign aimed at retrieving unpaid loans advanced to tertiary student borrowers who have defaulted on repayment terms governing the trust fund.
The SLTF as part of the initiative, has declared the month of July 2020, as Repayment Awareness Month and is undertaking various activities nationwide to make borrowers, employers and the general public more aware of the various platforms that may be used to repay loans.
Speaking on the Asaase Breakfast Show today, 9 July 2020, the chief executive officer of the Fund, Nana Kwaku Agyei Yeboah, said that the month of July has been set aside to call the attention of defaulting students to the need to make good their indebtedness to the fund. Nana Yeboah said a desk has been set up in the fund’s office solely for purposes of liaising with employers to deduct the loans from the salaries of employees who owe the trust fund.
“We set up a desk to continuously educate and engage employers to fulfill their legal obligation by deducting the loan from the workers’ salaries and paying it to us. We got to a point where we did a publication of names and faces in the papers.
“The law mandates us to do that and it worked because a lot of people didn’t want people to see that they owe, so it worked. We are encouraging beneficiaries and their guarantors to ensure that they pay during the moratorium period even though they are not obligated by law to pay during that period,” the SLTF chief executive officer said.
About Students Loan Trust Fund
The Students Loan Trust Fund (SLTF) was established in December 2005 under the Trustee Incorporation Act 1962 (Act 106).
As part of reforms to make accredited tertiary education more accessible to the majority of qualified Ghanaian students, the Government of Ghana passed the Student Loan Trust Fund Act 2011 (Act 820) for the efficient and effective disbursement of financial resources to tertiary students.
The trust fund has the responsibility to recover loans from students after the completion of their tertiary education.
The principal objectives of the trust fund are to provide financial resources for the sound management of the trust for the benefit of students and to help promote and facilitate the national ideals enshrined in Article 25 and 38 of the 1992 constitution.
Since its establishment in 2005, the fund has disbursed loans to over 120,000 students.
For more information on the Students Loan Trust Fund, visit: https://www.sltf.gov.gh/.
Asaase Radio / Wilberforce Asare
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