The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is the largest government-funded bursary scheme in the country. Each year, the organisation receives well over one million applications from disadvantaged students. This large influx of applications often results in delays and system difficulties for students who are trying to track the status of their applications.
Students who have had their NSFAS application declined are given the opportunity to appeal the decision. However, students are struggling to track their applications and appeals as the status appears to be stuck on one stage for a long period of time.
In an interview with PowerFM on Monday afternoon, NSFAS CEO, Andile Nongogo, gave some insight into what could be causing this.
Why Your NSFAS Application Is Stuck
If your application appears to be stuck when you run a NSFAS status check, it may be because that stage involves multiple steps that need to be taken before it can progress to the next stage. This is because the tracker is too broad, however, in coming years, NSFAS plans to improve this issue so that students are able to see the status of their application or appeal at every stage of the process.
Another common reason for NSFAS applications and appeals being stuck is that students are not uploading the required supporting documents or they are not uploading the correct supporting documents. In many cases, a student will just submit a random document in order to move onto the next stage of the appeal application, however, NSFAS cannot progress with your application if the correct documents are not uploaded.
For students claiming that institutions will not allow them to register due to their application status being "provisionally funded", Nongogo states that provisionally funded means that the student is funded, NSFAS is just awaiting registration information from the institution. NSFAS is working on changing this term to make it more easily understandable to both students and higher education institutions.
NSFAS Appeals Update
NSFAS will also be improving the appeal decision process to ensure that these delays are avoided in the future. NSFAS plans to provide 24/7 responses to queries, as well as have more people working on responding to direct messages and emails on their social media platforms. This way, students will not need to wait as long to receive communication from the financial aid scheme.
NSFAS is still working through the thousands of appeals they received for the 2023 academic year. Over the weekend, Nongogo revealed that the organisation responded to 20,000 appeal applications from students who were affected by academic progression criteria.
Despite NSFAS stating that appeal decisions would be finalised last week, this date has once again been moved to the end of the month.
