By Tony Manuaka
Abiola Metilelu, chief executive officer (CEO), PressPayNg, said there should be a platform where students in higher institutions “can creatively fund their tuition without dropping out of school.” He spoke with The Education Report on how the novel solution will empower students to commence tertiary education and complete it at the right time. Excerpts:
What motivated you to come up with this solution?
This is not an attempt to solve a problem from a helicopter view. I have a dropout history as well. I have had interactions with a lot of students on campus who are having challenges paying tuition. What I have decided to do with my team is to aggregate competencies to see how we can be part of the solution.
There is a fundamental problem with the education system. The sad reality is that government cannot fund education alone. And so there has to be that collaboration with the private sector.
How is your operation different from that of the financial technology companies that give quick loans without collateral?
We are currently in what is called the age of convergence, and this is merging of technologies. It talks about the integration of innovations. What we have decided to do is to be an aggregator. We have partnered with financial institutions, insurance companies, HMO service providers and players in the human capital sector as well.
We have been able to aggregate all these together and see how we can provide a holistic solution to the challenges in the education sector particularly at the tertiary level. This is not a Fintech so to speak.
Within the technology sector, we are more of an Edutech, which is an Education Technology solution. So the focus is the education sector, and our targets are parents and students in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The linchpin of our product has to do with tertiary education tuition savings.
We want students to be intentional about the financing of their tertiary education. It has to be a collective responsibility. They can access loans called Eduloan. We have EduSavings, which requires co-funding.
For instance, if your tuition is N100,000, you can save 50 per cent as your own equity contribution because we want to support students who are making efforts. That’s the starting point, and you can access the other 50 per cent as a soft loan. We aggregate the two and we credit the institution directly.
Even the students don’t have access to the fund because we have zero tolerance for scam and diversion of funds. We also have a level of interaction with the tertiary institutions as well.
There is also another offer, which has to do with health maintenance. We have seen instances where students on campus sometimes will fall ill and they don’t have the financial wherewithal to be able to access basic primary healthcare services. Some of them will have to be taken home to be attended to. And in the course of going home a lot of things happen. So, what we have done is to have a conversation with HMO service providers, and say, ‘can we come up with a product that fits into this target market?’ And so, we have what is called health maintenance which students can subscribe to. We have about 4,000 partnering hospitals nationwide. This is to give some form of proximity advantage to the students. So, if you subscribe to the HMO, you will be able to access basic primary healthcare service including admission and feeding in the hospital for two days.
We also have Education Insurance. We are partnering with insurance companies as well where parents who cannot pay for the tuition of their wards, can subscribe to their education insurance. In the event that the parent becomes incapacitated by reason of accident, critical illness or any other thing that would make them unable to get involved in productive activities, and they will not be able to source fund and pay tuition, the insurance company will take up the payment of tuition of their child till he or she graduates. So there will be no reason whatsoever to drop out of school.
We also have partnership with other brands within the human capital sector, where we offer holiday jobs to students so that when you are on break. You don’t just have to sit at home. Through the App, there’s a way you can profile yourself for a holiday job. With a one or two-month holiday job, we can also aggregate what you can get from there so that you will be able to fund your next tuition. We are also having interaction with organizations within the CSR space to see how we can partner with them to disburse either partial scholarship or full scholarship to students in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Our corporate objective is to flatten the dropout rate in tertiary institutions in Nigeria and also advance human capital.
Who among the students are qualified to benefit and how do you profile them?
We have several mechanisms for validating students and also evaluating their credit worthiness. This is done in collaboration with participating financial institutions. They do their own due diligence because they also have their own internal mechanisms for evaluating students who want to access Eduloans.
How are the students expected to pay back?
It is not just for students; parents can also access loans on behalf of their children. The preference for us is usually the parents. What we are trying to do is also trying to close the trust deficit between parents and students and also between public donors and students. You would have had this experience of students coming to ask for support to pay school fees. You may have asked for proper identification to ensure that the person is actually a student of an institution of higher learning. What we have done with PressPayNg is that we have excused you of that stress because on the App are only verified students of tertiary institutions in the country.
Who regulates the activities of your organization? In other words, are you licensed by any regulatory authority like the CBN, NDIC or NICOM?
The principal partner in terms of financial institutions is FCMB. We are not a financial institution but we have partnerships to ensure that due process and regulatory procedures are followed; and that good corporate governance is adhered to. When you act as an aggregator, when you have an understanding with participating brands within a sector, you have that regulatory coverage of the participating brands.