Youth Capital and Equal Education Call For Strengthening Support For TVET Students

Cape Town – With Human Rights Month underway under the theme “Making Human Dignity Real,”  Youth Capital, in collaboration with Equal Education are calling on policymakers to look into the systemic challenges undermining the human dignity and constitutional right to further education for students in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges.

This comes amid mounting student demonstrations across campuses, including recent protests at Ehlanzeni TVET College’s Mapulaneng Campus in Acornhoek, where learners highlighted shortages of study materials, limited water supply, and rising registration fees for 2026, reflecting broader challenges of chronic infrastructure deficits.

While the Constitution guarantees the right to further education, Senior Researcher for Education Funding and System Efficiency at Equal Education, Sam Beynon, highlighted the scale and complexity of these challenges. “The situation is multi-layered. Approximately 60 % of TVET students drop out in their first year, and among NSFAS-funded students, 69 % did not meet academic progression in 2025. Chronic underfunding has placed significant pressure on the system, affecting both institutional capacity and student outcomes. While funding allocations have improved in some areas, inconsistencies in disbursement can disrupt students’ access to essential resources, affecting their ability to stay on track academically.” Beynon added that while there were recent policy developments, including the equalisation of NSFAS allowances between TVET and university students, the real measure of success is whether these improvements translate into consistent, adequate support that enables them to stay and succeed in their studies.

In September 2025, the Minister of Higher Education and Training announced the NSFAS War Room, which was established to address key operational challenges affecting students and also intended to function as an early-warning mechanism. While this signals an important commitment to improving the system, questions remain about how these efforts are experienced by students on the ground.

As new interventions such as the NSFAS War Room are introduced, Youth Capital Project Lead Buhlebethu Magwaza said there is a growing need to understand how policy commitments translate into students’ everyday realities. “TVET and CET students continue to navigate uncertainty while pursuing pathways that are essential to the country’s development. At its core, this is about how the right to further education is realised in practice. Ensuring that students are supported to access, remain in, and complete their studies with dignity is essential to unlocking the role TVET colleges are meant to play in facilitating the school-to-work transition to address youth unemployment.”

Youth Capital has been engaging the Department of Higher Education and Training to better understand how the War Room interventions are unfolding in practice, as part of its ongoing work to bridge the gap between policy commitments and lived experience. Read more: https://youthcapital.co.za/nsfas-war-room-monitoring/.