In a written
response to parliamentary questions from the DA’s Andricus van der Westhuizen,
the Higher Education Minister Naledi Pandor revealed that, the National Student
Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) still has a backlog of more than 80 000 unresolved
bursary applications – with 19 000 being unsigned loan agreements – as at the
middle of this month.
In 2018 the Student financial aid scheme experienced challenges , including funding decisions, addressing the 2017 academic year backlog, the non-payment and delays in the payment of allowances, and a weakness in data integration between NSFAS and institutions.
This led to Minister Pandor appointing Dr Randall Carolissen as the administration.
In her reply,
Pandor said unresolved applications from 2017 and 2018 stood at 83186 as at
February 14.
“Of these,
19113 relate to unsigned loan/bursary agreements.”
She mentioned
that the absence of signed contracts prevented NSFAS from making payments to
the applicant or the educational institution at which they were registered.
According to
Minister Pandor, the students with unsigned contracts were sent regularly to
their host institutions for them to ensure the contracts were signed.
“Once signed,
fees and allowances can be paid immediately,” she said.
She mentioned that, a further 64073 are still
outstanding cases where there were internal system issues that prevented final
resolution of the bursary applications.
“Of these,
54807 (10333 from 2017 and 44474 from 2018) relate to changes in fees or
allowances that, for a number of reasons, are rejected by the processing
algorithm. The causes of these rejections have now been identified, and the
algorithm is being updated to resolve the blockage.”
She said NSFAS
had planned to complete this work by last Friday.
More than 400000 bursary applications were made to NSFAS, however, only about 170000 applicants qualified for bursaries for 2019 academic year.
