Engagement with DSI on postgraduate funding for STEM careers; new technology & innovation that could assist in providing proper sanitation in schools; with Minister

Meeting report

Minister overview

Minister Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, provided context on the presentation that would be shared with the Committee. He said it focused on postgraduate funding for all the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, innovation programmes, new technologies that could assist in providing proper sanitation at schools, and lastly, the Department of Science and Innovation's (DSI’s) support from corporate donors.

Postgraduate funding for STEM careers

Full cost study support programme

The 2021 academic year marked the first full year of implementing the DSI National Research Foundation (NRF) full cost of study support programme for three categories of postgraduate students. This meant that the DSI was no longer partially funding students, but was covering the full cost of tertiary fees for postgrad students. More than two-thirds of funded postgrad students received full cost of study support, as the policy was progressively introduced to new cohorts of students at all levels.

Funding and equity targets

To provide postgraduate funding for STEM careers, the Department implements its postgraduate funding programme through the NRF. The NRF accounts for 95% of the total annual postgrad students supported through programme four, which was one of the Department's strategic programmes. 5% of this money for supporting postgraduate students goes to funding STEM careers. In 2021/22, the DSI supported a total of 5 643 honours and masters’ students and 2 527 PhD students, in line with their equity targets of race, gender and nationality.

The Minister pointed out that those who argue that equity targets were no longer relevant and that they were discriminatory did not understand the nature of the challenges attached to more than three centuries of colonialism, and an apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994 that caused enormous damage in terms of science capabilities and science opportunities, and educational opportunities for South Africans. Those who say the government must put an end to equity targets were often the ones who were the most privileged in the past. The impact of their accumulated advantages continues to perpetuate a South Africa with racial and gender inequalities. The government was determined to continue chasing equity targets because it could not build a non-racial and non-sexist society while there remained a continued reproduction of the colonial and apartheid patterns. In the area of science and innovation, one would still find that there were some specialities in which hardly any black South Africans and hardly any black women were effectively participating.

The DSI has set a target of awarding 12 000 PhD bursaries in the 2019 to 2024 administration. By June 2022, they had supported 7 253 PhD students, so they do anticipate achieving their target of 12 000. The Department also aimed to support 24 000 pipeline students in honours and master’s programmes.

Conducting a tracer study

The Department had also conducted a tracer study which had not been done before in South Africa. The results would be shared with the Committee as soon as they become available. The mobility career pathways and other attributes of PhD students who graduated from South African universities between 2000 and 2018 were being studied to inform the Department on where these students had landed up, and whether they had been absorbed into the economy. They had also funded a study managed by the Water Research Commission on Innovation, as strategic innovation competencies should be developed and enhanced to develop careers in science. Their white paper had identified key areas in this regard.

Partnerships

Regarding the new technology and innovation that could assist in the provision of proper sanitation in schools, the DSI -- in partnership with the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) and the European Union (EU) -- was very proud to implement the viability and validation of innovations for service delivery programmes to demonstrate, pilot and evaluate the suitability and viability of technologies and innovation that could improve the delivery of basic services such as water, sanitation, renewable energy, and waste management in our municipalities. 32 municipalities were currently supported through this programme, which was designed to build partnerships between technology developers, publicly funded research institutions and the private sector, and municipalities. The Department was determined to ensure that supporting local government developments through science was a possibility.

The DSI was also implementing 126 intervention projects to support districts responding to needs relating to employment, entrepreneurship and economic opportunities for the youth, local economic development, local supplier value chains, and the secular economy. The Minister noted that they would be happy to arrange a tour for the Committee members to visit the projects' sites as an opportunity to learn more about the work that the DSI was doing. Also, in collaboration with the Water Research Commission, they established a water technologies demonstration programme to pool together the applied research and development and pre-commercialisation stages of the water innovation continuum. These scientific interventions were extremely vital, considering the cholera challenges and old water infrastructure, and assisting in water and sanitation.

See attached presentation for further details.

Discussion

The Chairperson said the Committee appreciated all the insightful presentations that had been made which covered many pressing issues and ultimately demonstrated that the DSI was addressing the serious challenges in the country through innovations that had the potential to positively shape the trajectory of the South African economy. The extensive research, innovation and technologies also had the potential of solving the challenges related to water scarcity and access to quality water and sanitation, which were the current pain points across the country, especially in rural communities and schools. He asked the DSI to provide clarity on who was involved in implementing these innovations and how they would ensure that employment opportunities were created through them for South Africans, and that South African companies would have a controlling interest over and above international partners.

Ms S Luthuli (EFF, KwaZulu-Natal) asked the Department to elaborate and provide an update on the fuel cell-powered forklift launched at Impala Platinum Refineries in March 2016. She also requested the Department to expound on their strategy to raise private sector funding with the Ikusasa Student Financial Aid Programme (ISFAP) which had been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and also to share case studies of the impact achieved through the funding strategy since it had been resuscitated.
 
Ms D Christians (DA, Northern Cape) wanted to know more about the collaborations with the entities, the agencies, and the science councils that had been mentioned, to leverage their expertise and resources in addressing the challenge of pit latrines and sanitation in schools. The Department had spoken at length about access to additional funding from corporates, but what exactly were the challenges the Department was facing in accessing additional funding and support from corporate organisations for research and innovation projects, specifically in addressing issues of pit latrines and sanitation in schools? What were the mechanics in terms of how the Department actively engages corporate organisations and potential donors? How did the Department plan to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of its innovations in eradicating pit latrines and improving school sanitation? In other words, were there any specific metrics or performance indicators that the Department was using to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of its interventions?

What were the eligibility criteria and application process for the free-standing scholarships the Department offered? How did the Department ensure equity and inclusivity in allocating scholarships and fellowships, particularly inclusivity, based on disability and generally all the under-represented backgrounds? What was the exact breakdown in terms of equity and inclusivity improvements concerning scholarship and fellowship allocations, both in the past and at present?

Ms Christians requested that the DSI provide more details on the collaboration and partnership agreements in which they were involved with the provincial Departments of Education. What specific initiatives flow out of these partnerships, and were they being implemented in schools? How was the Department going about training officials from the education districts on coding and robotics so that these initiatives would be properly introduced to schools by the Department of Basic Education (DBE)? Lastly, what were the Department's plans for scaling up on adopting eco-friendly sanitation technologies, such as easy-flush toilets and the clear recirculation toilet system, and how could the involvement of district municipalities be ensured?

The Chairperson asked the Department to explain how their research feeds into the Departments of Water and Health, because sanitation and water were closely linked. Also, had the Department's research demonstrated any behavioural changes once disseminated to the public at large?

Ms N Ndongeni (ANC, Eastern Cape) referred to the inter-bursary scheme founded in 2014 and 2016, and asked the Department to provide an update highlighting the key successes and challenges of the scheme during the five-year period. She also requested a breakdown of the research equipment in terms of provinces and the impact achieved in terms of the National System of Innovation (NSI). Could the Department elaborate on the reasons for the decline in the National Skills Fund budget allocation in terms of its impact on the specific programmes and qualifications supported by the NRF?

Mr I Ntsube (ANC, Free State) thanked the DSI team for their detailed presentation. He added that slide 17 indicated that students were qualifying for funding, but due to budget constraints, they were not funded -- out of 7 225 applications, only 5 910 were granted funding. What would happen to the other 1 315 applications? Would they be accommodated in the 2023 academic year since they had not been given the opportunity to further their studies in the 2022 academic year?

Concerning the key innovation programme within careers in science and innovation, specifically relating to hydrogen and energy, what were some of the technological capabilities the Department had deployed to resolve the ongoing challenge of load-shedding? Who were the strategic global partners, and did the Department have a relationship with the Gates Foundation for funding programmes related to policy issues? He pointed out that the government was not doing justice to the DSI by allocating such a small amount of money to their budget. He remarked that the state should be at the centre of technology and innovation for the development of the country, to encourage and stimulate growth for the benefit of the South African people.

The Chairperson asked whether the Department was being compensated for the research it was doing which benefited various private companies. In other words, were these companies contributing any resources and funds to the research done by the Department that had a significant impact on these companies? Regarding innovations involving the use of urine, would these innovations be sanitary?

Department's responses

Mr Imraan Patel, Deputy Director-General (DDG): Research Development and Support, DSI, explained that the agents involved in implementing innovations depended on the various focus areas. There were many different partnerships that the Department was involved in, and each area was distinct and unique and the focus of each area would dictate the kind of company that would be appropriate to form a partnership with. The Department takes a very strategic decision when determining who to partner with because it prioritises local businesses, but at times this was not possible because local entities did not have the kind of advanced technologies that companies overseas had. In instances where the Department partners with other countries, it does try to ensure that the interests of South Africans are prioritised as much as possible.

Mr Bheki Hadebe, Director: High End Skills, DSI, responded on the Department's strategy to raise private sector funding with the ISFAP, and said that the NRF had been able to sign a memorandum of agreement with the ISFAP, and funds had been raised to support masters’ students. There was also a R26 million investment from SASOL which the NRF had leveraged, and a memorandum signed with the German Academic Exchange Programme, in which the NRF received a R30 million contribution raised for students.

On the inclusivity and equity eligibility criteria, at the highest level, the issue of excellence and academic performance were key drivers. It was mainly the universities that made nominations for students who qualified. The NRF did not want to replicate the instrument of the means test used by the universities -- they were leveraging the expertise that already existed within the university environment to determine who qualified for the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). The universities would identify and prioritise the financially needy students and make nominations to the NRF. The NRF based their support on a number of criteria, such as academic excellence, gender, race, disciplinary record, relevance of research, and afforded historically disadvantaged institutions a proportion of funding for their fair share of students to be supported. This worked very well because the Department exceeded its targets for supporting blacks and women consistently, even at the PhD level. Around 70% of students that were funded were provided full cost funding, and most of those students would have received undergraduate funding from NSFAS.

It would be too early to give a detailed response on the challenges and successes of the inter-bursary scheme programme, because the DSI was finalising the evaluation process. However, in terms of anecdotal evidence, despite the small number of students, there were a lot of innovations that would not have seen the light of day if there were bigger numbers in the way that the NRF was providing support. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the South African National Zakáh Fund (SANZAF) had a lot of watered-down strategies. It was not about throwing money at the students -- it was about supporting them consistently to ensure they succeed at the end of the funding period. These were students that were trained in dedicated research development and innovation platforms. Their absorption was immediate where they did their research.

One of the factors that contributed to the decline in the national skills fund budget allocation was that its contribution had decreased by about R100 million from 2017 to 2021. Another contributing factor was when they introduced the postgraduate funding policy for the full cost of funding for certain categories of students; it had been introduced progressively for first-year master’s students, and this reduced the number of students funded overall. Since the advent of Covid-19, the DSI has started introducing extension support for master’s and PhD students. Due to Covid, interruptions resulted in students being unable to finish their fieldwork on time, so some of them were able to motivate for a six-month extension.

As to what would happen to the students who did not receive funding, the NRF did not capture this database for consideration in the following year. A new application round would be posted the following year, and those students that had been rejected would have to re-apply. He explained that they were finalising a holistic framework for student support, inclusive of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. They had presented a Cabinet memorandum in August last year which was part of an initiative to determine how the Department could fund the "missing middle", and it also motivated for postgraduate funding. The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) was leading the engagements for this initiative, and was engaging the private sector as well, particularly financial institutions, for the provision of soft loans for qualifying students and those soft loans could be underwritten by government. The memorandum had a range of proposals, but the main issues were related to addressing the lack of funding for the missing middle, and ramping up support for postgraduate students.

Mr Sibusiso Manzini, Chief Director: Research, Development and Support, DSI, described the work the DSI did at the basic education level, and said they had been working very closely with the Department of Basic Education since 2004. They collaborated on several initiatives related to science expos, mathematics Olympiads, and technology and innovation expos. These were broad-based initiatives that reach hundreds and thousands of learners every year to cultivate and nurture important skills for the future. The DSI and the DBE also collaborated every year during Science Week in August to bring awareness to learners about a variety of science-related careers and opportunities. Many schools were involved in this awareness week.

Regarding curriculum support, the DSI provided science centres in all nine provinces, which contained laboratories that exposed learners from disadvantaged schools to facilities and equipment that may not be available at their schools, enabling them to conduct experiments. On robotics and coding initiatives, they had introduced a programme where they train selected officials at the district level, and there were plans to eventually expand the training cohort to school management teams and various other participants who would be able to acquire the knowledge and skills in robotics and coding. A lot of this work was done through the National Research Foundation.

Dr Eugene Lottering, Deputy Chief Executive Officer (CEO), National Research Fund, said the country’s science system worked, but it could be developed to a greater level with additional funding. He said it was gut-wrenching to turn away students who qualified to study science when so much time was spent promoting science to those very students through their science advancement organisation. The R1.3 billion shortage in student funding desperately needed to be addressed because the country used science and engineering as a driver for economic development, and this meant that the nation needed to ensure that as many young scientists as possible were afforded a chance to be absorbed by the system.

Mr Cosmas Chiteme, Director: Alternative Energy, DSI, confirmed they supported several fuel-cell-related projects. On the mobility side, other than the forklift they did with Impala Platinum, they had collaborated with the South African Post Office (SAPO) to use hydrogen fuel cells to extend the energy range previously achieved by just using batteries. The fuel cell acted as an on-board charging mechanism, ensuring that the delivery scooters using the fuel cells could travel three times the previous distance.

There were other examples where fuel cells had been adopted and piloted. On the stationary fuel cell side, a project was initiated in the Masiya village in Limpopo, where they tried to use fuel cells to assist the community in preserving agricultural products produced in the area. There was also another fuel cell deployment they had installed at Mintek that would assist the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) in using the energy for their information communication technology (ICT) equipment. Another project looked at the installation of fuel cells at the Department of Mineral Resources building in Pretoria. Lastly, there was a project earmarked for the Eastern Cape at the police station in Bizana, which would also consist of the fuel cells assisting the station with their power challenges during load-shedding. These were the projects that were being targeted for the current financial year.

The partnership still existed with Impala, and they continued to run the fuel cell at their centre based at the University of the Western Cape. Impala provided the maintenance and support for the project and the forklift was still working as part of their refinery operations. The centre had produced another forklift where they had optimised the engine, integrating hydrogen tanks. Despite having collected a lot of data, some of the challenges they still faced included cost issues, which explained why there was very little uptake from the private sector, but recent engagement with the private sector had, demonstrated that they were willing to pay the price to adopt some of the technology.

He added that the hydrogen and fuel cell, combined with batteries, could be deployed at an industrial level. Trucks require two megawatts (MW) of power, which is met through a combination of fuel cells and batteries. The batteries provide 1.2 MW of power, and 800 kilowatts (kW) of fuel cells were used. This was part of the Platinum Valley initiative, which started from Limpopo through to Durban, targeting the use of fuel cells in heavy duty trucks and converting them from diesel to hydrogen power.

D Mmboneni Muofhe r Mmboneni Muofhe, Deputy Director-General: Technology Innovation, DSI, referred to the uptake and massification of the initiatives, and explained that their focus and responsibility was to demonstrate that a particular technology worked so that those who were in the relevant departments or industries could take up these technologies either for massified implementation or for commercialisation. After demonstrating that a particular sanitation technology worked, they did not have the resources to implement them at the municipal level, for instance.

Ms Busisiwe Ntuli, Director: Technology for Sustainable Livelihoods, DSI, said the implementing agent for the South African Sanitation Technology Enterprise Programme (SASTEP) was the Water Research Commission, but the programme was a collaborative effort that draws in several stakeholders from national and local government, as well as the private sector. The private sector had an interest firstly as a provider in the solutions market, but also there was potential for corporate social investment (CSI) funding from the private sector, particularly for rolling out innovations in private schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the Department of Science and Innovation’s strategic partner, and the Department has their expertise, and they could tap into their network. More importantly, they were a co-funder -- the R15 million pot for the demonstration was partly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The evaluation process of the outcomes and impact of the SASTEP was ongoing, and they looked at both formative and summative evaluations as methodologies. The idea was to look at several areas such as user acceptability, and how these feed into government policies. The Department of Water and Sanitation was one of the partners collaborating with the Department.

Closing remarks

Mr Patel emphasised that they needed to make strategic decisions around postgraduate funding based on a detailed analysis of how they could effectively ensure that they maximise the impact of the DSI’s postgraduate funding, and this led to the need for a full cost model. He noted that the relationship between the DSI and the Department of Higher Education and Training was improving and gaining a lot of momentum to the point where they were collaborating on research and discussing ways in which the post school education and training system could support the innovation system concerning hydrogen fuel cells.

He added that they would continue to make incremental gains to ensure that every deserving student was able to receive funding. He also reinforced the fact that technology must be implemented in the system by creating an enabling environment for that innovation to be taken up more effectively. In the sanitation space, they had needed to work very closely with the South African Bureau of Standards at one point in time to look at the standards for non-sewered sanitation. The existing standards would have killed a lot of innovation, because they were inappropriate for the time.

As they implemented the white paper with its focus on impact, they were partnering very closely with all the other agencies that could make or break innovation to ensure that they were working with them all the time so that standards or regulations did not block opportunities. The discussion on local versus international partnerships depended on the field they were focusing on -- typically, in mature sectors, they could work with local organisations, but in relatively new sectors, they needed to tap into the global market. It therefore makes sense at an early stage to partner with international players so that if they do have export ambitions, those ambitions are able to be realised. There would be a series of engagements between the DSI and the local private sector.

The Chairperson thanked the presenters for attending the Committee meeting and for responding to their questions with immense detail. The presentation was very insightful. If the Committee had more questions, those would be communicated in writing to the DSI.

Mr Patel thanked the Committee for giving them the opportunity to present their work. They always found engagements with the Committee very useful because it pointed out the priorities and focus of the legislators and elected representatives that they need to factor into as a bureaucracy and administration. They were also grateful for the support expressed by the Members for the DSI’s profile and budget to increase.

Committee minutes

The Chairperson asked the Committee secretary to display the Committee minutes for the meeting held on 31 May, and for the Members to indicate whether they had any comments regarding matters arising from the minutes.

Ms E Nkosi (ANC, Mpumalanga) moved to adopt the minutes, stating that they were a true reflection of the meeting held that day.

Mr Ntsube seconded.

The minutes were adopted.

Committee Reports

The Chairperson presented the Committee's draft report on Budget Vote No. 35, Science and Innovation, dated 13 June. He remarked that the report had been with the Committee for quite some time.

Ms Nkosi moved to adopt the report, and Mr Ntsube seconded.

The Chairperson presented the Committee's draft report on Budget Vote No.37, Sports, Arts and Culture, dated 14 June.

Mr Ntsube moved to adopt the report, and Ms Nkosi seconded.

Both reports were adopted.

The meeting was adjourned.