On Wednesday, 22 March 2023 the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) appeared before Parliament's higher education portfolio committee after tertiary students demanded that issues of historic student debt, student accommodation and registration be addressed urgently.
NSFAS has stated that it is working with private accommodation service providers across South Africa to solve issues of accommodation.
In March, the bursary scheme has accredited an additional 3 000 beds for students seeking accommodation.
The NSFAS Chief Operations Officer, Nthuseng Mphahlele said that inspection of the properties started in February 2023 after the listing of the accommodation with the entity went live in November 2022.
Mphahlele said that most of the private accommodation service providers are small to medium service providers. Workshops were held to assist the service providers in understanding the NSFAS requirements.
The COO said:
We picked up that we had to educate them because there was a huge gap in understanding what student accommodation needs to look like.
NSFAS is in the process of verifying available beds and promoting the increase of accommodation for students.
The Deputy Higher Education Minister Buti Manamela has said that even though the budget allocated to the higher education sector has been increasing over the past few years, the sector is still experiencing infrastructure backlogs in student accommodation and Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges that must still be built and this remains a priority for the Department of Higher Education and Training.
Manamela said that there will be a large amount of money spent on infrastructure.
