Lending for Education in Africa Partnership: An innovative student loan programme

• In Event: Financing Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia

Proposal

The Lending for Education in Africa Partnership (LEAP) is a Kenyan-based higher education project providing a new form of complementary student financing to youth from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. Students who receive loans from LEAP, known as Leap Fellows (once the repayment of their loans has been completed, they are known as LEAP Alumni), have access to a range of professional development opportunities via the LEAP model, which encourages frequent contact with students beyond the transactional touchpoints of loan application, disbursement and repayment. The intentional naming of loan recipients indicates the innovative bundled support (financial and non-financial) that students receive from LEAP. As a social lending fund, LEAP provides a unique learning opportunity for development finance institutions and the impact investing community looking to bridge state and market failures in the higher education financing space.
In the discussion, we will go beyond the biodemographic descriptive statistics of the recipients of LEAP loans and provide interdisciplinary learnings that will be of interest to financial service providers, policymakers, higher education institutions in the Global South, and education practitioners. To do this, we studied a rich quantitative-qualitative dataset of over 2200 applicants spanning four cohorts of LEAP Fellows.
We used the dataset to explore factors influencing the likelihood of being selected into a tertiary education lending scheme in Sub-Saharan Africa against the original theory of change developmental outcome assumptions behind LEAP. We supplemented the quantitative dataset with qualitative insights from follow on focus groups with LEAP Fellows, alumni and staff in Kenya.
To make sense of the findings, we employed complexity and anthropological analytical lenses. From a complex adaptive systems point of view, finance arguably represents a set of static, old cultural practices that are hard to change. While at the same time, social anthropology teaches us that cultures may morph over time but are fairly sticky. Whereas traditions can be hacked. From these perspectives, our contribution not only surfaces new innovative finance traditions from the lived experiences of LEAP Fellows and project team but also provokes new debates about whether the new innovations in higher education are coupled with needed access or perpetuate old finance cultures.

Author

• Justine Burns, University of Cape Town