By Thebe Mabanga
Waseem Carrim, the interim CEO of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme, says stability and full resolution of outstanding operational issues will take between six and eight months.
These include making payments to service providers and student allowances, and addressing challenges around student accommodation.
On Monday, NSFAS apologised for the delayed payment of TVET student allowances originally scheduled for last Friday. Due to a system glitch related to the size of the batch files, these payments were processed on Saturday and have been reflected in all student accounts as of Sunday.
Carrim confirmed that NSFAS would make all outstanding payments from last year to accommodation service providers this week.
“We have not been an efficient and effective organisation, and we realise that delayed payments cause frustration and anxiety. We are working to address these in a timely manner. Payment to accommodation service providers will be settled within this week,” Carrim, who took up his role in early March, told Inside Education.
Payment of student accommodation has led to frustration among landlords and students, with some facing eviction or unable to access accommodation for this academic year.
Earlier this month, NSFAS urged students who had received R10,800 designated for accommodation allowances to settle their outstanding payments directly with their landlords.
Carrim confirmed that the delayed payment in student allowances was caused by a technical glitch due to batch sizes, with four files processing up to 50,000 records each.
Higher Education and Training Minister Nobuhle Nkabane apologised for the inconvenience on Monday, saying “delayed payments are unacceptable”.
“We recognise the impact of these delays as students depend entirely on their allowances for living expenses. We are committed to ensuring that our students receive the essential support efficiently and promptly.”
Carrim also confirmed that by the end of this week, all TVET colleges’ allowances, all university upfront payments, and accommodation top-ups until the end of April would be paid.
He said NSFAS has retained intermediaries for the payment of accommodation and other services, while students were often paid directly or through their institutions.
Carrim noted that other causes of delayed payments included hold-ups in finalising registrations and the outcome of appeals for students whose funding has been declined.
In her statement, Nkabane confirmed that most appeals have been dealt with, without saying how many.
“The NSFAS Appeals and Tribunals Committee is currently reviewing these outcomes to ensure consistency and appropriate application of policy,” the minister said.
Carrim told Inside Education that the challenges around accommodation started when NSFAS took over this function from institutions. The issue was that the infrastructure was uneven, especially for accommodation in rural provinces.
South Africa currently has a backlog of 300,000 beds in student accommodation, and NSFAS looks after one million students in universities and TVET colleges at any given time.
“The first thing we need is a student accommodation policy,” said Carrim.
This policy would set norms and standards and possibly regulate costs.
He also said infrastructure needed to be addressed, as was currently done by the Department of Higher Education and the Department of Human Settlements.
“This will then allow us to hand the function back to institutions.”
He said that one area of improvement he hoped to drive was throughput, or the proportion of NSFAS-funded students who completed their studies, which currently stood at about a third.
“We need to see an improved return on investment,” he said, noting that if a student did not complete their qualification, there was already investment that had gone into them for a year or two.
The scheme needed to dedicate resources to tracking these students to assess their progress and their impact and contribution to the South African economy.
Carrim said a key moment of change for the scheme came about in 2018, in the wake of the #FeesMustFall protests that swept across university campuses in 2016. This led to NSFAS changing from partial loan funding to full bursaries.
Moving into the future, he wants to help develop a culture of excellence that will help define an “ideal NSFAS student” in conduct and academia.
Although students from the past five years were no longer required to pay back loans, the youth activist who worked at the National Youth Development Agency before joining NSFAS, said it was important that beneficiaries contributed to helping the scheme become sustainable and changing the trajectory of youth unemployment because a substantial number of graduates struggled to find employment once they left tertiary institutions.
INSIDE EDUCATION
