Boosting Scholarship, Bursary Administration Process to Ensure Education of Indigent Students

Abdul Rahaman Lekki is the Executive Secretary of the Lagos State Scholarship Board. In this interview with select journalists, including Funmi Ogundare, he explained the efforts the agency has put in place since his appointment in July 2022 to ensure a seamless and transparent scholarship and bursary administration process that the private sector could key into so that indigent students of the state descent can complete their studies

The Lagos State Scholarship Board was established in 1968 with the mandate to award scholarships and bursaries to indigenes of Lagos State studying in any part of the country. Since then, the state government has subsidised education, utilising bursaries and scholarships to assist indigenes and residents in achieving their educational aspirations.

The board’s Executive Secretary, Abdul Rahaman Lekki, explained that since he came on board on July 15, 2022, his office saw the need to review its activities, ensure proper documentation and actionable data of beneficiaries, and expand its relationship with the organised private sector. 

To achieve this, he stated that the board decided to separate some functions within the agency and create a structure that will relate more with the private sector to boost the 2022 scholarship budget, which stands at around N1.95 billion, to impact education funding effectively.

“Before now, when students apply for scholarships or bursaries, we have a scholarship department which advertises it, and people apply for it. They do the processing and the four levels of verification: indigenship, studentship, academic status and assessment in the case of scholarships,” said Lekki. “All of that is conducted by the bursary department, which is very cumbersome. So we felt a need to separate the auditor from the accountant to make the process more tidy.”

The board also created the partnership and assessment department, saddled with the responsibility of handing over the applicants’ processed documents to a separate department that will carry out assessment for verification.

Lekki added, “So when they finish the verification, they will hand it over to another department to continue managing them. The department has been fully approved by the Head of Service and currently in operation. As we speak, we have the bursary, partnership and assessment departments. They handle assessment and verification and we are trying to build with organised private sector, governments and organisation to see if they can partner with us as far as scholarship and bursary is concerned.”

The executive secretary added that the board had to complete the digitisation process of application that would ensure that students can apply, pay and complete their application processes online compared with the old analogue processes.

“We are happy that students don’t have to come here again for the processes but they can finish the whole process within one hour online. We also introduced virtual application process to ensure that the system has some levels of integrity,” he explained. “Before now, students bring their results here for verification, but we agreed that as a board, we will not go through that route to avoid fake results being brought , but verification will be done by the school directly. So the schools send us reports of all of them.”

He disclosed that once “we complete our automation process, some schools such as LASU and UNILAG told us that they were Application Programming Interphase (API) ready,” indicating that “if we want to complete our verification process, we don’t need to send mail. Our system is connected to theirs. The system verifies the candidate and sends it back to us that you are a student.”

Other initiatives that the agency has put in place, the scholarship board boss noted, include the area of inclusion and youth development under the THEMES agenda of the current administration.

“Under it, we came up with the special scholarship category. We inaugurated a special scholarship for people with disabilities and multi-dimensionally poor and vulnerable. We have sent that to the Ministry of Economic Planning,” Lekki stated. “This year, there will be a budget for it if the government decides to do a reordering of its budget.”

Lekki said the board has a social register of the multi-dimensionally poor and vulnerable domiciled in the Ministry of Planning and Budget, adding that it was compiled with the support of the World Bank, which carried out multi-layer enumerations to determine those who are poor and vulnerable.

“They went to communities and slums to gather the list of all of those people, and from there, we would be able to mine directly the people who are poor and vulnerable. We will also do our own check because there may be some other persons who may not have been captured who are equally poor and applied for the award,” said Lekki. 

He also mentioned that there “are other layers of verification which we are trying to put in place. We want them to submit their BVN and tax returns, which is a declaration of what your income is. The third layer is like designing a technology platform where we can do an assessment of the students.”

The board is also working with the office of disability affairs to ensure that people with disabilities benefit from scholarships and bursaries as much as possible, as the executive secretary noted that many rules around this scholarship will be relaxed.

“For you to get a scholarship, you must have a distinction or first class. We will continue to pay you once you satisfy all the requirements, such as being a student and maintaining your CGPA, then you now become a subsequent beneficiary, but for the poor, we have to relax the rules. Someone who is poor may have intellectual capacity, but they may be hindred because of the condition that they find themselves in,” the board’s executive secretary. 

“We would continue to support them and relax the rules for them to enable them benefit from government scholarship,” Lekki stressed.

He, however, expressed optimism that by next year, the governor will make funds available for the special categories of scholarships that the board plans to introduce to enable indigenes access education. 

“The governor prioritises social services. The size of education funding, as of today, should not be less than N30 billion, but about 50 per cent of students in tertiary institutions are not able to fund their education,” Lekki added. “If you want to support them to fund their education, you need a huge resource base to do that and that is one of the reasons we established the partnership and assessment department to look at how can we bring in the private sector to be a part of it.”

A breaking down of the allocation for scholarships showed  that N164,500,000 has been earmarked for 792  2021/2022 fresh scholarship award undergraduate, masters and PhD (batch B), 2021/2022 subsequent scholarship award for undergraduate and PhD,  2022/2023 subsequent scholarship award for undergraduate and PhD recipients, as well as the 2022/2023 governor’s discretionary awards.

The executive secretary stated that an allocation of N210,955,000 has been approved for 4,375  2021/2022 fresh bursary award for undergraduates and Law School (batch B), 2021/2022 subsequent bursary award for undergraduates, and 2022/2023 subsequent bursary award for undergraduates.

“Earlier in March, N171,100,000 was approved for 799 for the 2021/2022 fresh scholarship award for undergraduate, masters and PhD (Batch A), as well as N303,000,000 for 2,509 2021/2022 fresh bursary award for undergraduates (Batch A).

“In all, a total N678,455,000 has so far been released this year 2023 for 8,475 scholarship and bursary beneficiaries,” Lekki stated.