The education sector has received a massive boost with leading financial powerhouse, FirstBank’s support for various educational institutions with loans worth N10 billion within the last year.
The support, which was offered though the FirstEdu product, an educational solution created to enhance educational facilities in schools, was targeted at improving the general quality of education across the country.
The firstEdu loan is targeted at private nursery, primary and secondary schools to assist the schools in achieving their desired growth in the medium and long-term.
As such, school owners/proprietors can also stay ahead to make learning easy and conducive for students.
The product enables the schools to access facilities with no tangible collateral, apart from domiciliation of school fees account with the bank.
To compliment the offer, FirstEdu portal, a modular and robust web-based enterprise portal, was also introduced to enable tertiary educational institutions manage academic, administrative, professional, logistics and payment challenges.
The product features and benefits include; e-Learning, virtual library and facilitation of exchange programmes with foreign educational institutions; academic & student events/time-table/calendar management; school fees payment via the internet; online information and result checking;interactive community forum between students and teachers.
It also affords applicants the opportunity of enrolling from the comfort of their homes or any location around the world; no licensing, installation and maintenance cost and plugs avenues for revenue leakages amongst others.
Group Executive, e-Business & Retail Products, First Bank of Nigeria Limited, Chuma Ezirim, said: “With FirstEdu, private schools across the various tiers of education in Nigeria; elementary, secondary and tertiary, have the right tool to boost their business to the level they desire.
‘’We are pleased to have already disbursed over N10 billion loans to schools in one year and we would continue to support growth in this key sector of our economy.”
“At FirstBank, we identify with the impact of the educational sector on the socio-economic activities of the country and importantly the lives of everyone. We remain committed to supporting schools as education is the core and root factor at enabling growth of our economy” he concluded.
