NSFAS | Students left stranded
JOHANNESBURG - The beginning of your tertiary educations should be a time of excitement and anticipation of what the future holds but for many hopeful students the opposite is true.
Faced with financial constraints, lack of accommodation and resources, many students are left stranded, sleeping on park benches with the hope of receiving funding to change their lives for the better.
For previously disadvantaged individuals the cycle of struggle characterises their lives due to the cracks in the system.
Education activists have called for the National Student Financial Aid scheme to apply stringent funding processes to avoid irregular payments.
The Special Investigating Unit reportedly recovered up to R2 billions of over-payments made to institutions of higher education.
Asive Dlanjwa, the National Spokesperson at the South African Union of Students, explained the issue, "the issue of student accommodation in South Africa remains a crisis, as it has been for a number of years owing to a few things."
"The first one is that you've got a largely unregulated student accommodation sector. Number two [is that] you've got a shortage of beds."
"When we speak of the shortage of beds, we're not speaking of the availability of any bed but we are speaking of beds that are accredited and meet the minimum standards of students to be able to live there but also to be able to participate in their teaching and learning and student accommodation that is safe for students to reside," he said.