Implementation of a Scholarship Disbursement Tracking System for a Federal Agency in Lagos State

Federal scholarship disbursement processes in Lagos State are hampered by manual tracking of beneficiary payments, delayed remittances, and limited reporting to oversight authorities. This study describes the implementation of a scholarship disbursement tracking system for a federal education intervention agency operating in Lagos State, South West Nigeria. The system was developed using PHP and MySQL, supporting beneficiary onboarding, bank account verification, payment batch preparation, disbursement confirmation recording, beneficiary status monitoring, and automated arrears identification. Integration with a payment notification webhook from the agency's bank enabled automatic confirmation of successful transfers. Development used Rapid Application Development over three cycles with five agency finance officers as core users. Functional testing validated disbursement computation, arrears detection, and batch report generation across 100 test scenarios with 100 percent accuracy. A live pilot tracked disbursements for 380 beneficiaries across two scholarship cohorts over four months. Post-deployment analysis indicated that payment reconciliation time reduced from two weeks to less than 48 hours per batch cycle. Undisbursed payments were identified and resolved for 22 beneficiaries previously unreported in manual records. Staff satisfaction with the system was rated 4.3 out of 5.0. The study recommends adoption of the system across all disbursement offices of the agency and integration with the National Scholarship Portal to provide beneficiary self-service payment status access.

Keywords: scholarship disbursement, payment tracking, federal agency, Lagos State, education funding