Reimagining higher education as an engine of economic growth:
South Africa faces a structural problem defined by high youth unemployment, graduate exclusion from the labour market, slow economic growth and declining industrial capacity.
Despite having universities and technical and vocational education and training colleges across the country, these institutions largely function as centres of teaching and certification rather than engines of direct economic participation.
The national policy proposal I have submitted to the presidency, the treasury and the department of higher education and training seeks to fundamentally redesign the role of higher education in South Africa’s economy.
The policy reform proposal argues that universities and technical and vocational education and training colleges should no longer be viewed only as educational institutions but also as productive economic hubs that generate employment, support enterprise creation, drive industrialisation and stimulate local economic development.
South Africa already possesses many of the assets required for transformation, including campuses, workshops, land, laboratories, a student population, technical skills, procurement budgets and research capacity.
The problem is that these assets are underused and do not contribute sufficiently to national economic growth and job creation.
At the centre of the proposal is the idea that higher education institutions must perform five integrated national functions: educate, employ, produce, innovate and industrialise.
In this model, students would not only study towards qualifications, but would also participate in structured work opportunities through campus enterprises, apprenticeships, production systems and entrepreneurial programmes while completing their studies.
The proposal seeks to close the gap between education and economic participation by ensuring that institutions themselves become employers and enterprise ecosystems.
The proposal highlights that South Africa’s universities and technical and vocational education and training colleges can become productive economic nodes distributed across all provinces.
Universities would focus on higher-value sectors such as software development, engineering innovation, research commercialisation, artificial intelligence, digital services, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing partnerships and start-up incubation.
Technical and vocational education and training colleges, on the other hand, would become frontline centres of practical production and industrial capability, focusing on welding, fabrication, electrical systems, construction, agro-processing, plumbing, machinery maintenance, repair industries and technical contracting.
A key feature of the policy is the establishment of campus enterprise units (CEUs) at every institution. These units would operate as structured commercial and enterprise divisions responsible for identifying business opportunities, managing campus ventures, coordinating student employment systems, attracting private investment and linking institutional activities to surrounding local economies.
Campus enterprises could include logistics, printing services, furniture production, software agencies, maintenance services, uniforms and apparel manufacturing, canteens, agro-processing operations and digital service hubs.
The proposal strongly emphasises re-industrialisation as a national objective.
South Africa has experienced years of industrial decline, import dependence and weakened manufacturing competitiveness.
The policy proposes using higher education institutions as decentralised industrial anchors capable of stimulating domestic production.
Campuses would become regional production hubs linked to provincial economic strengths. For example:
• Gauteng institutions could focus on engineering, electronics, software and manufacturing;
• KwaZulu-Natal could focus on port logistics and agro-processing;
• Eastern Cape institutions could focus on automotive components and fabrication;
• Western Cape institutions could focus on food technology and green industries; and
• Limpopo and Mpumalanga institutions could focus on mining support industries and agro-processing.
In the proposed policy, public procurement is identified as a major lever for success. Government departments, municipalities and state-owned entities could direct portions of procurement towards accredited campus enterprises. Through procurement reform, institutions would gain reliable markets while students gain real economic opportunities.
The policy would promote strategic collaboration with the private sector.
Businesses would be encouraged to partner with institutions through supplier development programmes, technology transfer, investment partnerships, incubation support, infrastructure development and co-production agreements.
However, the proposal emphasises that such partnerships must protect public value, ensure student participation and avoid exploitative arrangements.
Financially, the proposal recommends a blended funding model involving government allocations, development finance institutions, commercial investment, donor funding, private sector funding and institutional assets.
Initial pilot programmes would require seed funding to establish governance systems, technology platforms, infrastructure, training systems and working capital.
Over time, institutions would generate recurring revenue from commercial operations, service contracts, production activities, technology licensing, retail margins and digital platforms, improving their financial sustainability and reducing pressure on the public fiscus.
The anticipated effect of the proposal is significant.
It aims to create large-scale employment opportunities for students and graduates, strengthen small and medium enterprises, expand local manufacturing, improve tax revenues, reduce dependence on social grants and stimulate local economies surrounding campuses.
The proposal also highlights the broader social benefits of reducing youth unemployment, including lower crime rates, improved household income, stronger community stability and renewed confidence among young people.
To implement the policy, the proposal recommends a phased national rollout beginning with pilot institutions selected according to size, leadership readiness, sector suitability and economic location.
A national steering structure involving government, higher education institutions, technical and vocational education and training leadership, private sector representatives and student bodies would oversee implementation.
Legal and regulatory reforms would also be required to allow institutions to operate commercial entities, participate more effectively in procurement systems and establish structured student employment frameworks.
Ultimately, the proposal presents higher education not merely as a social service, but as a strategic national development platform.
Higher education institutions should no longer remain isolated academic institutions in an economy struggling with unemployment and de-industrialisation.
Instead, they should become active engines of employment, enterprise development, production, innovation and industrial renewal, capable of contributing directly to the creation of a more productive, inclusive and economically resilient South Africa.
Andile Shongwe is the CEO of the Black Business League, a national chamber dedicated to the advancement of black-owned enterprises. His focus is on trade justice, entrepreneurship and economic development.
Amid the mostly depressing HIV headlines of recent times, concerned as they mainly are with the deadly impacts of donor defunding, South Africa’s imminent roll-out of a twice-yearly HIV prevention injection called lenacapavir (LEN) has been a spot of bright light.
Staff in 360 healthcare facilities spread across the country stand trained and ready to receive and administer the drug, which has been found to be near perfectly successful in preventing HIV when administered twice yearly, attracting cliches like “game-changer”, “groundbreaking” and “new dawn”, although contrarian voices warn that the public benefit of rapid LEN roll-outs in African contexts is far from clear.
Now is not the time to drop the ball, to use another cliché, but many in the HIV space take comfort in the knowledge that the person responsible is Hasina Subedar, the health department’s senior technical adviser in HIV prevention.
Getting Subedar to give an interview took some convincing (she eschews the limelight) but she ultimately took a call on a Saturday afternoon in late April, with LEN all but ready to launch.
After some connectivity issues — “Is this better? Hang on, I’ll move closer to the modem. Hello, Hello, He-LO-HO … ” — Subedar tries to minimise the achievement.
“It’s not my first, um … ”
“Rodeo?” I interject, with too much enthusiasm.
“Roll-out!”
Before LEN, Subedar oversaw the roll-out of a once-a-day HIV prevention pill (a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP medication) for HIV-negative South Africans wanting to protect themselves against infection, becoming, former health department director-general Yogan Pillay told me, “one of the most experienced people in understanding PrEP provision and one of its leading advocates”.
When I exclaim about the responsibility she shoulders, Subedar chuckles and says: “I don’t get stressed easily. I am on a high all the time. I just have to keep moving and things have to run like clockwork.”
She works from 6am to 11pm every day and typically takes off only from 16 December, the Day of Reconciliation, until 3 January. Last year, however, she worked through.
“I had to sit and finish all the training materials [for clinic staff to be able to administer LEN], while worrying over consignments of drugs that still needed to come into the country,” says Subedar, who for the past nine months has met weekly with all the organisations involved in supplying the drug, a process she describes as “immensely complex and at times quite fraught”.
“Relax your grip and there’s a chance the drugs will simply not make it into the country. I have had to become a very hard taskmaster for people who don’t do the things they’re supposed to be doing,” she says.
Grit, grace and humour
With the drugs now in the country, the next step is getting LEN to those most likely to benefit from it, a challenge made markedly trickier by the Trump administration’s funding cuts to South Africa, which, according to a report released by Physicians for Human Rights and partners in April, have undermined much of the infrastructure — such as community-based testing and field recruitment for HIV prevention services — needed to create demand for LEN.
How will such yawning gaps be bridged?
In answering, Subedar focuses on the opportunity inherent in decreased donor funding.
“Previously, with the oral PrEP roll-out, we had donors telling us: ‘This is where you must implement. These are the populations you must implement for.’ It was initially led by them [donors] and this often resulted in fragmented service delivery.
“With LEN, I was determined that it would be government-led and not rolled out by partner-funded projects but instead integrated within public primary healthcare from the outset.”
If questions remain about the viability of the plan (a prominent HIV researcher told me that Subedar “is constantly having to make things work in a sea of mediocrity”), her competency is widely acknowledged.
Francois Venter, the executive director of Ezintsha at the University of the Witwatersrand, recognised Subedar’s work ethic and “absolute integrity”. Desmond Tutu Foundation chief executive Professor Linda-Gail Bekker praised her ability to work well with a spectrum of roleplayers, “doing so with grit, grace and humour”.
These are not innate abilities. How, I wonder aloud, were they forged?
“I’m from Pietermaritzburg,” Subedar begins, as if this on its own answers the question.
“I was born there, in Edendale Hospital. My father was a tailor who wanted a boy but instead my mother had five girls, so I was often dressed like a boy from the time I was little,” she says.
Subedar’s parents, Hajira and Goolam Subedar, were both largely self-taught people, denied education by family circumstances.
“It was important to them that we should receive the education they were denied. My father always said: ‘The one thing you must always do is educate yourself because nobody can ever take away your education,’ which is so true.”
The Subedar family lived towards the bottom end of East Street (renamed Masukwana Street in 2014), near the mosque. For junior school, the girls attended the Nizamia School, 200m from their home but had to walk much further for senior school, to Pietermaritzburg Indian Girls’ High School, on Berg Street.
Subedar says she was “non-conformist” and found the compulsory afternoon sport “quite challenging”. “You had to find a way of ducking out if somehow or other,” she says.
As the middle child, she was often left to fend for herself, never quite included in the alliances of her two elder and two younger sisters. This would prove consequential.
The Subedars were a political family who often shared what little they had with the families of Robben Island detainees like Harry Gwala. Subedar’s father decided that one of his daughters should go and live in the home of another detainee, Abdool Kader Hassim, to support his wife Nina and two young sons.
“My older sisters flat out refused and since my younger sisters were too young, it pointed at me,” says Subedar, admitting that she resented the imposition initially but came to appreciate the experience.
“Our own home was a tiny little place, with the bathroom and toilet separate outside. For hot water you had to make a fire below a copper geyser but when I went to live with Nina and her boys I had my own room and I learnt a lot.
“I became more politicised around this time, which wasn’t unique to me. It was a common experience in the areas and communities we lived in but it shaped my thinking. There wasn’t this thing of we are Indian and they are African. We were very integrated in lots of ways.”
The other force shaping Subedar’s outlook was money, or rather the lack of it.
“My father’s work completely dried up when I was at high school, so I had to work to support myself,” says Subedar, who dropped out of a social work degree after just one year due to a lack of funds.
Her choice to study nursing was born mainly out of need — she would be able to study and earn, enabling her to support the family — but there was something else.
“When I was 18 years old I was attacked by a man who tried to kill me. I was left badly injured: two of my fingers were completely severed and a third was left non-functional,” she recalls.
Amid the chaos of the emergency, the nurses who attended to Subedar in hospital provided a refuge of calmness and kindness.
“My hair had lots of glass and sand in it and one of the nurses said: ‘Let me wash your hair for you.’ And that meant so much to me,” she says, confirming that the experiences of care strongly factored in her decision to study nursing.
Subedar says she emerged from the experience a more compassionate person, “especially towards those experiencing rupture in their lives” and resolved to move forward “without any self-pity — without ever talking about it, in fact — while finding ways to compensate for the considerable loss of functionality in my left hand”.
The black section and the white section
Within a month of applying to train as a nurse, Subedar was on her way to Cape Town, to learn and work in Groote Schuur Hospital, where “there was a black section and a white section and you stayed on your side!” (Ever the non-conformist, Subedar found ways of undermining workplace apartheid, playing squash late at night “at the white residence where we were not allowed to be”).
In Pietermaritzburg, Subedar had been well aware of the inequality in the education system. Now, she saw it up close in the health system.
“One of the things I did as a student was go into Langa to train people in first aid. Ambulances weren’t going into Langa at night and in many instances people died at the police station for want of basic care.”
Subedar qualified as a professional nurse and spent some time working in intensive care units, until her son was born, at which point she returned to Pietermaritzburg to be closer to her family, taking a position as a mental healthcare nurse at Fort Napier, the psychiatric hospital and later as part of an outreach team in Durban communities like Chatsworth, Phoenix and Merebank.
“It was a refreshing change, more humane in many respects, because I could spend time with people who were dealing with life in all of its complexity,” she says.
When she was granted long leave in 1989, Subedar used it to further her studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where she was ultimately offered a post providing clinical training to student nurses in both psychiatry and midwifery.
Having left Cape Town with a diploma in nursing, Subedar managed, by 1993, to complete a basic degree, a qualification in nursing education, an honours in psychology and a master’s in mental health nursing, all while working and raising a son as a single parent.
“Shame, I moved around and this poor child moved everywhere with me. At one point he said to me: ‘Mom, you are very lucky you have me as a son,’ and that is so true because he never complained, he just adjusted every time.”
After South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, Subedar, who had participated in some of the strategic teams that had been set up in advance to look at the transformation of healthcare, decided to move back to the Western Cape, feeling that of all the provinces, its mental health services were the most in need of transformation, concentrated as they were in psychiatric hospitals like Valkenberg, Lentegeur, Stikland and Alexandra.
“One of the reasons I left academia to go back into the [public health] system was to contribute to the realisation of the idea that basic services should be taken out of hospitals and made available in communities,” says Subedar, who spent three hopeful years — from 1997 to 2000 — working on the establishment of community mental health services in the Western Cape, only to become frustrated with the province’s see-saw politics.
“We had three health MECs in that period with different political affiliations and I think this influenced the direction in which we went, which was not what I had envisaged,” she says.
In 2000, Subedar was headhunted to work at the South African Nursing Council as its registrar, opening a new and distinct chapter in her life.
“I was the first female registrar and the first person of colour to hold that position,” says Subedar, recalling that the discourse on transformation when she entered the council, “was at the level of worrying about what new pictures to put on the walls and which building names should change, not about the profession and what needed to happen to transform it”.
“We had this changing health system, which is also needing to respond to new challenges like the HIV/Aids pandemic. For me, one of the priorities was making sure that our professionals are able to work in such a system,” says Subedar, who instigated a review of the scope of practice of nurses, with appropriate adjustment to their education.
The South Africa’s Nursing Act of 2005 was largely based on the new frameworks Subedar developed and she believes it “clearly defines what nurses should be doing and what the regulations are and making sure that those regulations enable the nurses to do what they have to do.”
The next step was to have been the transformation of the nursing education system. “That’s the part that …” she starts to say, but her voice peters out. She doesn’t need to describe the crisis in nursing education in South Africa currently, which has been well publicised.
Instead of necessary transformation, nursing education has been compressed by the closure of several nursing colleges and choked by changing qualification requirements, contributing to a situation in which nearly half of all nurses registered with the South African Nursing Council are over the age of 50.
Subedar’s time at the council ended badly. In 2008, controversially, her contract was not renewed, leading her to take legal action. She was reinstated for a short time but departed in 2009.
“I didn’t know what to do at that point but an opportunity arose to come back into the department to assist with the healthcare re-engineering process. It was this question of ‘how do we restructure primary healthcare and make it more functional in the current system?’”
Learning from scratch
So began her time “of sort of developing stuff for the department and delivering for them”.
When she was asked to roll out HPV vaccination in 2012, it was a one line instruction: “You will roll out the HPV vaccination, it will be in March 2013 and a treasury allocation will be made available but only in April 2013,” Subedar recalls, mirthfully.
“There was no pilot, yet we had to reach every public school within 20 days, campaign style. I learnt a few valuable lessons in all that. You need to know how many people are required for the work and to understand who is going to do what.
“Your people need to be competent and they need to be supported. Do they understand their role? Do they have job aids [tools such as checklists, algorithms and explanatory posters]? Those campaigns were scripted to the T,” she says, adding, “the beauty of all of this is that people, once they have direction and know what they need to do, they get it done, especially at the province level.”
Typically, whenever she has taken on a new project for the department, Subedar has started in complete unfamiliarity.
“On the day I was approached about HPV vaccination, I did not know what it was. I did not know how it needed to be administered. I knew nothing but this was a strength because I needed to systematically grasp the subject.
“I learnt from scratch on PrEP, too,” says Subedar, who advocates, “seeking out the experts and literature on the clinical trials and studies and getting them to provide you with all the technical information that is required for the direction that you need to go and then just shaping it, so that it will work in the real world in which you want to implement”.
The consultative approach has not been without its challenges.
“With oral PrEP, I sat in the very first meeting with these incredibly forceful HIV researchers and everybody was doing their own study and had their own ideas about what should be done and which population we should be focusing on, be it men who have sex with men, adolescent girls, sex workers or transgender people.
“Disappointment was guaranteed,” says Subedar, insisting her personal motto remains “collaboration”.
“I might not agree with you but I will listen. All stakeholders should have a space to give their view, including civil society. It [collaboration] doesn’t come naturally to the department of health but if anybody tries to create animosity or start excluding people, I would intervene,” she says, before politely ending the conversation.
A difficult problem has arisen and for once it has nothing to do with her work.
“I am renovating and the contractor failed to cover my room, so everything — my clothes, my linen, my floors — is coated in a fine layer of dust.”
This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.
Parliament probes Stellenbosch University as cracks in system show:
While management at Stellenbosch University (SU) projected stability and excellence, students, auditors and internal oversight bodies warned of chronic debt, unsafe housing, National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) failures and slow transformation.
The university recently arrived in parliament with a polished presentation: Vision 2040, academic excellence, financial sustainability, world-class research and a governance system that ticks every compliance box.
On paper, it is the model of a modern, highly-ranked African university — confident, stable and globally competitive. But as the portfolio committee on higher education in the National Assembly listened to submissions on 29 April, a different picture emerged.
Beneath the surface of excellence lies a campus wrestling with deep inequalities, rising student debt, unsafe living conditions and a national funding system in disarray.
Add to that the auditor-general’s warning that the higher education sector is drifting without clear performance measures and the story becomes one of a university and a system at a crossroads.
This was not just another oversight meeting. It saw the official narrative collide with the lived reality of students and the cold assessments of auditors and internal governance bodies.
A world class institution — on paper
Stellenbosch’s official presentation was everything one expects from a world-class university with global ambitions.
Vision 2040 positions the SU as “Africa’s leading research-intensive university, globally recognised as excellent, inclusive and innovative”.
The numbers back the ambition: strong throughput rates, high module success and a steady rise in black African enrolments, up 16.5% in 2026.
Financially, the SU reported consistent unqualified audits, a going concern status and a diversified income base. Governance structures are intact, with 60% of the council external and independent.
There were no indicators of governance failure, the university assured MPs.
But even in the polished narrative, cracks showed. Outstanding student fees ballooned from R699 million in 2024 to R1.12 billion in 2025. NSFAS alone owed the university R454m by year-end.
While the SU emphasised its stability, it conceded that operational sustainability depended heavily on debt collection and the timely flow of NSFAS funds — a risky foundation in the current climate.
The university also acknowledged the strain of student accommodation shortages, gender-based violence (GBV) and safety concerns on and around campus. Yet the issues were presented as manageable — challenges being addressed through systems, committees and protocols.
Then the students spoke.
The Student Representative Council’s stark reality check
If the university’s management offered parliament a view from the boardroom, the SRC delivered the view from the ground, reflecting the disconnect between management and those that matter as the heartbeat of a university.
The Student Debt Working Group processed more than 1 000 applications this year. Only 200 students received assistance. The debt cap for self-funded students sits at R10 000 — a figure that means little when total fees exceed R100 000.
For NSFAS-funded students, the situation is worse. The SRC described a system in freefall: incorrect document flags, outdated household income data, funded students not receiving allowances, appeals portals that don’t work, unanswered emails and call centres that never pick up.
The result? Students who are “funded” on paper but are unable to register, pay rent or buy food. “Funding approval does not guarantee financial access,” the SRC told MPs — a line that should haunt policymakers.
“Missing middle” students whose families earn too much for NSFAS but too little to afford university remain stranded. International students face upfront costs of about R80 000 before they can even register, regardless of their academic progress or payment history.
And then there is safety. Stellenbosch is an open campus, integrated with the town. But the SRC detailed a rise in stalking, armed intimidation, attempted break-ins and even potential abduction risks.
Off campus, students are pushed into high-crime areas such as Cloetesville and Idas Valley because that is where rent falls within the NSFAS cap of R5 200.
In Stellenbosch Central, a single room averages R9 156. A studio can reach R12 000. Students are forced to choose between affordability and safety — a choice no young person should have to make.
On safety and GBV, the university outlines a zero-tolerance GBV framework, with more than 400 survivors supported in 2024 and 2025. Crime on campus remains a concern; the SU deploys drones, patrols, CCTV and walkwith services.
The Institutional Forum: transformation lagging
The Institutional Forum (IF), Stellenbosch’s internal oversight body on transformation, added yet another layer to the story. While the SU emphasised its transformation commitments, the IF pointed to structural issues that persist beneath the rhetoric.
Two senior appointment committees in the past year had no African black members. Candidates from designated groups often decline SU offers because the remuneration is “not market-related” but the IF noted that cultural issues may be an additional barrier.
The IF also raised concerns about the university’s ad hoc approach to student debt and emergency accommodation. Those were not administrative inconveniences, the IF argued. They were transformation issues that required a sustainable, institutionalised response.
The auditor-general: A sector drifting without accountability
If the SRC exposed the human cost and the IF highlighted internal governance gaps, the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) widened the lens to the entire higher education system — and the findings were alarming.
The AGSA’s review of the department of higher education and training’s (DHET) annual performance plans revealed:
- Key national priorities missing from the annual performance plan (including the new NSFAS model and 10 000 jobs via pay for performance);
- Indicators that measure paperwork, not performance (for example, counting reports instead of evaluating outcomes);
- Targets lower than previous years’ achievements (a quiet lowering of ambition);
- Poorly defined indicators and unverifiable data sources; and
- Sector education and training authorities (Setas) (setting low completion targets enabling them to “achieve” without delivering real skills outcomes.
The AGSA warned that performance reporting risked becoming “a passive record of sector activities rather than a credible assessment of public sector performance”.
In other words, the system is not measuring what matters.
This has direct implications for universities like Stellenbosch, which depend on NSFAS, Setas and DHET oversight to function effectively.
A sector under pressure — and a university caught in the middle
Taken together, the four presentations tell a story far more complex than the one Stellenbosch management alone could offer.
The university is academically strong but financially strained by student debt and NSFAS instability. Students are achieving but many are living in unsafe conditions and facing financial exclusion.
Transformation is a stated priority — but internal structures lack diversity and cultural readiness. The national system is meant to support universities — but their planning and accountability mechanisms are weak.
Stellenbosch is not failing. But it is operating in a sector where the foundations are shifting and where the gap between policy and lived experience is widening.
Where to from here?
Parliament has a clear picture: a university striving for excellence; students struggling to survive, internal bodies calling for deeper transformation and auditors warning of systemic drift
The question is whether the department, the NSFAS and universities will act — or whether the sector will continue to rely on crisis management, ad hoc interventions and the resilience of students who are stretched to breaking point.
For Stellenbosch, the challenge is to ensure that its Vision 2040 — a world-class, inclusive, research-intensive university — is not just a slogan but a lived reality for every student who walks its campus.
Because, as parliament heard last week, excellence means little if students cannot afford to study, struggle to find safe accommodation or do not trust the systems meant to support them.
Marking one year in office on 15 April, vice-chancellor Professor Deresh Ramjugernath describes his first year as a period of setting the tone and direction rather than making headline announcements.
His emphasis has been on alignment, clarity and a shared commitment to SU’s Vision 2040, with the aim of Stellenbosch being trusted not only for what it achieves but also for what it contributes to society.
He reframes “excellence” as purposeful: strengthening teaching and learning, academic standards and research quality, while ensuring that scholarship addresses real-world challenges.
In his view, inclusion is not a separate project but integral to excellence, alongside the work of shifting perceptions shaped by the university’s past through consistent, visible progress.
He applies the same outcomes focus to innovation: Stellenbosch’s ideas must translate into tangible change beyond campus through stronger partnerships with communities, industry and policy environments.
With that foundation laid, Ramjugernath positions the next phase as one of delivery — turning engagement and relationship-building into action that is visible in classrooms, evident in research and felt in the broader society the SU serves.
His closing message is that intention is not enough: institutional trust is ultimately built through delivery.
But if Ramjugernath needed any reminder that addressing students struggles remains integral to the success of any vision, he would have got the message clearly in parliament.
©Higher Education Media Services. — www.ednews.africa
Submit and get free exposure here: Showcase Your Business | Advertise Your Special Offers.
