Ghana’s no-guarantor student loan scheme was made possible by the Ghana card, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia has indicated.

Dr Bawumia, on Wednesday, 8 June 2022, launched the policy at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi.

The policy was a promise made by the Akufo-Addo government prior to the 2020 elections.

The aim is to make tertiary education accessible to Ghanaian youth, especially graduates from the highly subscribed Free Senior High School programme.

Dr Bawumia stated that with the No-Guarantor Student Loan scheme, “the cumbersome and restrictive scheme of students providing SSNIT contributors as guarantors before they could access student loan for tertiary education, has been abolished.”

The No-Guarantor Student Loan policy makes it possible for qualified young Ghanaians to access loans to fund their tertiary education, using their Ghana card.

Extoling the importance of the Ghana at the recently-held Civil Service Awards ceremony in Accra on 29 July 2022, in order to drive home his earlier insistence that he would prefer the Ghana card to 1,000 interchanges, Dr Bawumia said: “Today, because of the unique identification, we’ve been able to introduce a no-guarantor student loan policy because, before, you needed to bring guarantors because you didn’t know whether you’d find this student or not, once they started working, and the workers who were on SSNIT, some of them have paid a heavy price for guaranteeing for students who have run away, but now, we can identify everybody uniquely and we are going to start this from birth because we are linking Ghana Health Service, Birth and Deaths with the NIA now and we hope by the end of this year, … the system would have been completed and when a child is born, that is when we issue the national ID number and they take it through school till death and that is how we transform this economy”.

The Ghana card is a valid verification document issued by the National Identification Authority (NIA) to Ghanaians and resident foreign nationals living everywhere for the purpose of identification.

The card bears personal information about the individuals whose identity can be verified at all times. The NIA National Identity System utilises three types of biometric technology for identification purposes.

These are the fingerprints unique to each individual in the form of digitised templates, and facial templates in the form of a digitised colour photo of the cardholder and the iris.

The card contains basic identification information including a photograph of the cardholder, along with a name, date of birth, height, and a personal identification number that has been randomly generated and assigned to the holder and has an expiry date.