By IPS Correspondents
OSLO, Aug 3 1999 (IPS)

As part of its aid programmes, Norway has been providing education loans to students from developing countries since 1978, in a financial scheme that has now several hundred former students facing astronomical debts, to be paid within 20 years.

The system was reformed in 1994 – when it was transformed into a regular educational grant fund – but those who started their studies before that year are still required to repay their debt to the Norwegian State Education Loan Fund.

Some 4,000 students, mainly from Africa and Asia have benefited from the programme since it was launched in 1978

For Ghana’s Emanuel Ofori Ayeh (41), who came to Norway in 1990, the loan system means he will have to deal with a debt burden of some 50,000 US dollars, while Evelyne Tegonoh (26), from Cameroon, will not pay anything, as she received a scholarship after 1994.

“This is most unfair” says Ayeh, who is currently striving for a doctorate in biology at the University of Tromsoe in northern Norway. “I cannot expect to earn more than 250 dollars a-month in Ghana – and that is if I find a job related to my profession.”

People like Ayeh – with a higher education and an international exposure most of their peers will never enjoy – are more likely to find the best-paid jobs back home, but that does not necessarily make it easy, as the labour market is not always prepared to absorb staff at their level.

Petter Skarheim, a spokesman for the department of Finance for Education at the Norwegian ministry of Education, admits that there are difficulties, but he says the government also has a strategy to deal with it, on a strictly individual basis.

Skarheim stressed that so far there have been no plans for a cross-the board- cancellation of debts to people who started school in Norway before 1994.

The student loans’ interests start accumulating after a seven- month grace period, since the moment beneficiaries leave school. In the case of Ayeh, there will be required quarterly payments over the next 20 years, which based on an annual interest rate of 7.2 percent will make the final figure climb from 26,800 to nearly 50,000 dollars.

Since 1994, the Norwegian government is using a traditional carrot-and-stick approach in order to prevent unwanted immigration and make the programme work for the purposes it was designed: the debt is written off only to those who return home and prove that they had been there for at least a year after finishing school.

Ane-Marie Hektoen, an adviser for foreign students at the University in Tromsoe, , says she does not approve the different standards applied to those who came before and after 1994.

In a report on Ghanaian students who have returned home with examination certificates from Norwegian institutions,, she states that “nobody had told them that the loan had to be paid back. They took it for granted that the loan was to be considered development aid.”

“Even student counsellors at Norwegian universities assumed this, and that the loan was part of a package aimed at assisting educational systems in developing countries – aid to the third world,” she says.

Hektoen wrote in her report that the educational system in Sub- Saharan Africa has experienced a negative development both economically and professionally in the last two decades.

“While universities were once symbols of African national states, schools now have deteriorated considerably in quality,” she concludes after her visit to, amongst others, the University of Ghana in Accra.

Since 1978, the so-called Article on Developing Countries of the State Education Loan Fund, has been apportioning funds for students from low-income countries to continue their education in Norway, and was regarded as part of the government’s overall developing-aid strategy.

Most of the some 4,000 students who have obtained educational loans have come from Ghana and Bangladesh, and some 50 percent of them return to their country of origin after finishing their studies, according to official statistics.

In 1994 the Norwegian authorities ended the payback-arrangement for newcomers but without a retroactive effect. “I will never be able to pay back the money I owe to Norway. I will spend the rest of my life feeling terrible about not being able to handle my loan,” Ayeh says.

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