Friday, September 20, 2024
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has officially opened the 2025 application process. This is for those students who require financial support for their full-time academic studies from the 2025 year onwards.
Higher Education and Training Minister, Dr Nobuhle Nkabane, launched the opening of the application process during a media briefing held in Pretoria on Friday.
NSFAS applications are now open and will close on 15 December 2024.
Nkabane said since its inception, NSFAS has supported more than five million beneficiaries, producing hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals, especially from within the poor and working-class sections of society.
"Those are the motivating forces that must be mobilised to contribute to the ongoing transformation of our country. The social transformation entails changing the material conditions of all South Africans for the better and education plays a vital role in ensuring that this becomes a reality," Nkabane said.
NSFAS has been an instrumental vehicle in making sure that government produces the necessary labour force for a capable here state.
In this year alone the NSFAS scheme is supporting about 1.2 million students, with the number anticipated to grow in 2025.
NSFAS supports qualifying students who are studying at public universities or TVET Colleges across South Africa. The scheme pays for tuition fees, accommodation fees, transports fees, and also certain living allowances - nsfas status all dependent on the student and their requirements.
“This demonstrates the role that the scheme has played in trying to change the structural colonial apartheid system that we have inherited, whose legacy persists even in the 30 years of democracy".
"NSFAS is the only tool we have at our disposal for the total liberation of children of historically oppressed people.
"As from this year, we have also decided to introduce measures to support students who check here are currently not supported by the NSFAS bursary and funding policy".
"We successfully did this through the implementation check here of the first phase of the Comprehensive Student Funding Model, which ensures that the missing middle students access financial support from government in a form of a loan check here from NSFAS to pursue their studies," Nkabane said.
** Story from SAnews.gov.za