First Bank introduces financial package for educational institutions

First Bank of Nigeria Limited has introduced a financial package that provides loans and other benefits to educational institutions to enable them manage academic, administrative, professional, logistics payment challenges.

The Lagos-headquartered financial services company announced this in a statement issued on Wednesday.

The modular package, titled ‘FirstEdu’, encompasses the FirstEdu loan and FirstEdu portal, both of which are targeted at enhancing educational facilities in schools and administrative procedures in these intuitions.

“FirstEdu loan is targeted at private Nursery and Primary and Secondary schools to assist the schools in achieving their desired growth in the medium and long-term. The product provides funding to replace old furniture and equipment, pay staff salaries, purchase brand new or fairly-used buses,” the statement read.

“It also funds these academic institutions to enable them to refurbish dilapidated buildings and classroom blocks. With this product, school owners/proprietors can stay ahead of the competition at all times and enables the schools to access facility with no tangible collateral, apart from domiciliation of school fees account with the Bank.

“FirstEdu portal is a modular and robust web-based enterprise portal that enables tertiary educational institutions manage academic, administrative, professional, logistics and payment challenges. The basis for its robustness is to take the stress of logistics, administrative and payment challenges off the institutions, as they focus on meeting their year-long, medium and long-term objectives.

 “The product features and benefits include; e-Learning, virtual library and facilitation of exchange programmes with foreign educational institutions; academic and student events/time-table/calendar management; school fees payment via the internet; online information and result checking; and 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.”

Chuma Ezirim, e-business and retail products executive at First Bank, said the new package has disbursed over N5 billion to academic institutions across the country in 2019 alone.

He added that it would support Nigeria’s education sector by empowering school owners.

“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. With over N5 billion loans already disbursed to schools this year alone, we are committed to supporting growth in this key sector of our economy,” the statement read.