Bursary Management System

Impact achieved:

As part of its constitutional mandate and responsibilities, the Office of The Premier’s is required to aid, support, and facilitate efforts (reasonably) to help its citizens to access further education. These efforts are realized through the establishment of a discretionary bursary scheme. Through the established bursary scheme, the OTP can identify new and existing university youth that are both deserving and qualifying as per the regulations and policies of the bursary scheme.

The current AS-IS management of the bursary awarding, disbursement and management is paper reliant and internally segregated. This greatly affects the results of the department’s audit findings.

Challenges faced with the previous process:

• Ineffective management of records,

• Inadequate monitoring of bursaries and payments made to the bursaries,

• Bursaries incorrectly awarded, or due processes not tracked during awarding,

• Bursaries not reconciled, and

• Bursaries awarded and payments made to ‘non-existed’ bursary holders.

Our implemented solution aimed to answer all previous challenges and audit findings. Since the findings focused on the awarding, monitoring and payments of the bursaries, our system therefore delivered the following system features:

1. Bursary Awarding

• Referral Platform – a transparent platform where different department employees can make referrals of potential bursary recipients. This answered the query of the source of the students that are funded.

• Online Applications – Once referred, students are provided an encrypted link to apply for the bursary. Through the application, the system uses the Department of Home Affairs database to authenticate the identity of the student.

• Applications processing and awarding – Once applications are received, the applications go through the 3 different sets of adjudication by different appointed panel members, where they’re processed, and moved to the final stage of awarding by the Director General.

2. Bursars Monitoring

• Student Online portal – A portal for the students to apply and track their submitted application. Once awarded (or rejected) they are notified through the system and have access to their Awarding documentation (contract, policy, and letter of undertaking).

• Onboarding and Orientation – Through the system, the OTP can onboard the students and orientate them to the bursary programme and its policy requirements.

• Registration confirmation – Once onboarded, students provide their registration details, which includes loading of the registered modules.

• Performance tracking – Throughout their term of funding, student use the system to provide performance updates to the OTP by uploading their marks and statement of results from their institutions.

• Communication – The OTP can use the system to directly send messages to the students on the online portal, and students can also send back messages.

3. Payments

• National Treasury CSD verified of suppliers submit their invoices directly to the OTP for payments. These invoices are then verified on the system and processed and payments are then prepared against the relevant student(s) and sent to the finance department for due processing as legislated.

• Once payments are made, proof of payments are sent through to the students for record keeping.