Building a Student Loan Tracking Portal for a State Scholarship Board in Edo State

State scholarship boards in Edo State face administrative challenges in tracking beneficiary repayment obligations, loan disbursements, and scholarship compliance, resulting in poor recovery rates and loss of public funds. This study describes the development of a web-based student loan tracking portal for the Edo State Scholarship Board. The portal was built using Laravel and MySQL, supporting beneficiary onboarding, loan disbursement tracking, repayment scheduling, automatic reminder messaging via email and SMS, and annual compliance reporting. Requirements were derived from interviews with Edo State Scholarship Board staff and six former scholarship recipients. Role-based access distinguishes administrative officers, finance officers, and beneficiary-facing views. Functional testing validated all disbursement calculation algorithms and repayment schedule computations across 200 test cases with 100 percent accuracy. A two-month pilot with 150 current beneficiaries demonstrated that automated reminders increased on-time repayment events by 27 percent compared to the manual reminder process. Staff reported significant time savings in monthly reconciliation. The study concludes that digital loan management tools can materially improve the financial sustainability of state scholarship programmes in South South Nigeria and recommends the Edo State government fund full deployment and data migration from existing paper records.

Keywords: loan tracking portal, scholarship management, Edo State, student welfare, financial administration