The demographics of the 45 000 students is not immediately available, the Department will ask NSFAS to retrieve the data from its systems.
The discrepancies were only picked up after data remediation which takes place on the 28th March 2023 up to 29th June 2023 and these were only communicated to affected applicants, NSFAS communicated to students on the 10th of July 2023 via a media statement after they were picked up.
The discrepancies were caused by the outdated data received from SARS and NSFAS verification processes and financial eligibility assessments. After identifying the problem, NSFAS re-instated 14703 of the continuing students to be funded again and the remaining 31225 students remained unfunded and were given the opportunity to appeal.
We have implemented system enhancements to mitigate the problem moving forward, we have also moved away from the manual processes that were being utilized. Moving forward, the system will communicate with external parties directly via APIS to ensure that the data is not manipulated in any form.