The Higher Education Loans Board (HELB) disbursed Sh3.04 billion in student loan funds during the week of 16 June 2026, ending a six-week delay that had left 180,000 university and TVET students without stipend money as the second semester entered its final weeks. The release followed sustained pressure from student unions, parliamentary questions from the Education Committee, and a viral social media campaign — amplified by the Gen Z networks that have been politically active since the 2024 protest wave — in which students shared images of empty bank accounts and overdue rent notices under the hashtag #HELBTunaSubiri.
HELB Chief Executive Officer Charles Ringera confirmed the disbursement in a statement issued on 17 June, attributing the delay to the rollout of a new loan management system intended to integrate HELB’s database with the Kenya Revenue Authority’s income registry, a reform designed to improve means-testing accuracy and reduce loan leakage to ineligible recipients. “The system migration took longer than projected. We regret the disruption to students and acknowledge that delays of this length are unacceptable,” he said.
Who Was Affected
Of the 180,000 beneficiaries, approximately 142,000 are undergraduate students at public universities, with the remainder split between private universities accredited for HELB support and technical colleges. Loan amounts range from Sh35,000 to Sh60,000 per semester depending on the student’s financial need score — itself recalculated under HELB’s revised means-testing model that was introduced in the 2025–26 academic year and factors in household income, number of dependants, and county of origin’s Human Development Index score.
Students in Nairobi, Mombasa, and other major urban centres bore the most acute cash-flow pressure, given higher living costs. University of Nairobi student leader Millicent Otieno, speaking to ZaKenya.com hours after disbursement was confirmed, said many students had relied on mobile money credit — including M-Pesa’s Fuliza overdraft — to cover food and transport costs during the wait. “Some students were going two days without a proper meal. For an institution that talks about the Bottom-Up agenda, leaving students to borrow from a mobile app at 0.5 per cent daily interest is an embarrassment,” she said.
The New Repayment Model Under Scrutiny
The delay coincided with HELB’s public consultation on a proposed shift to income-contingent repayment — a model under which loan repayment obligations are pegged to the graduate’s actual earnings rather than a fixed monthly instalment, similar to systems operating in the United Kingdom and Australia. Under the proposal, graduates earning below Sh50,000 per month would pay nothing, with repayment rates scaling from two per cent to eight per cent of monthly income above that threshold.
The model has been broadly welcomed by graduate advocacy groups, who argue the current fixed-repayment system disproportionately burdens early-career workers in low-wage sectors. However, the Kenya Private Sector Alliance raised concerns about administrative complexity, noting that not all employers are plugged into the KRA’s payroll systems through which HELB would track income. Self-employed graduates and those in the informal sector — a large and growing cohort — present particular compliance challenges that the proposal has not yet fully addressed.
Systemic Pressures on HELB
HELB’s funding pressures reflect broader fiscal constraints within President Ruto’s administration as it navigates the IMF programme conditions that have tightened discretionary spending across government. The board’s allocation in the 2026–27 budget stands at Sh18.4 billion, an increase of 12 per cent over the previous year — but one that education economists argue is insufficient to keep pace with rising university enrolment, which has grown 19 per cent since 2022 following the absorption of the first large CBC-adjacent cohorts into higher education pathways.
Parliament’s Education Committee has recommended a review of HELB’s capitalisation model, proposing that the government seed an endowment fund using a portion of unclaimed dividends from state corporations — a mechanism modelled loosely on South Africa’s National Student Financial Aid Scheme. Treasury officials have not committed to the proposal but have indicated it will be considered alongside a wider review of higher education financing expected in the third quarter of 2026.
For the 180,000 students who spent six weeks checking their M-Pesa statements with increasing anxiety, the policy debates are less urgent than the simple relief of seeing funds arrive. HELB has committed to establishing a real-time disbursement tracker on its portal so that students can monitor the status of each semester’s release — a transparency measure that, if implemented effectively, should at minimum reduce the uncertainty that made this particular delay so difficult to endure.
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