Nelson Mandela University aims to raise over R5 million in its latest Giving Campaign. Themed Empower Futures: Nourish Minds, Fund Dreams, the 2025 campaign wants to address two pressing needs at the University:

• To help deserving students who cannot fund their studies; and
• To help students forced to skip daily meals because they cannot afford food.

We intend to raise R5 million for bursaries and scholarships, and an additional, half a million rand for student nutrition.

Why we chose these goals

These two objectives are bound up in what makes Nelson Mandela University so special.

The name of the University comes with responsibilities.

In July 2017, at the official launch of the naming of Nelson Mandela University - formerly known as the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University – the then deputy president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, said in his keynote address: “A university that associates itself with Nelson Mandela… must remain rooted in answering the challenges that confront our society in a global economy. This must be an African university, that serves the continent and her people”.

Nelson Mandela University has more than stepped up to this challenge. We have laid our cards on the table about, how committed we are to being inclusive and have pledged to liberate human potential through learning.

We are special because we are a university that represents opportunities. A popular choice for prospective students, Nelson Mandela University is the largest higher education institution in the Eastern and Southern Cape, with 30 000 or so students. More than 60% of our first-entering students come from the most poorly resourced schools - known as quintiles one, two and three - in South Africa. Many of these schools have feeding schemes.

Despite these challenges, students from these low-income areas have attained the marks required to study at Mandela University. Now they need financial support in the form of bursaries and scholarships and help with nutrition. Otherwise these deserving candidates will be denied the chance to attain their dreams and might face uncertain futures.

Food insecurity

Mandela University is located in the Eastern Cape, one of the poorest and most rural provinces in the country. Nonceba Kontsiwe, the province’s MEC for agriculture, said recently: “The department of agriculture has sleepless nights due to food insecurity in the province. We should intensify efforts to help rural communities produce and increase access to affordable and nutritious food”.

Writing in www.foodformzansi.co.za  on 3 June 2025, she said the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey revealed 20% of households in the province are severely food insecure. Her department has allocated R60 million to implement a programme to address this.

If that is the state of the provincial dilemma, it is supposedly worse on campus.

Professor Stephen Devereux, the National Research Foundation’s SA-UK Bilateral Chair in Food Security and one of the founders of South Africa’s Union Against Hunger movement started in February 2025, said in a colloquium at the University of the Western Cape in 2018 that students are more likely to be food insecure than others in the population.

An article in the Daily Maverick on 8 March 2025, with the headline “Starved for education – the harsh hunger crisis gripping SA university campuses”,  stated that with “food prices soaring and allowances failing to keep up, thousands of students are missing meals and struggling to study on empty stomachs”.

Isn’t there a government fund that helps students?

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) funds only students whose immediate families or guardians earn a combined income of less than R350 000 per year.

Those whose families earn a combined income of more than this amount but who still cannot afford to pay varsity fees, accomodation and monthly living expenses, are not funded by NSFAS. The children of nurses, teachers and policeman, the foundations of our society, are among those not eligible for NSFAS. These are the students, referred to as “the missing middle”, who need bursaries.

Furthermore, once a student graduates with an undergraduate degree, there is no more NSFAS funding. NSFAS does not fund postgraduate education, not even a postgraduate diploma or a qualification that continues a course, such as an LLB or law degree.

In addition, NSFAS funding is often delayed and the amount for subsistence is or delayed in meeting students’ food security requirements. Not all students in need of nutrition have access to NSFAS funding.

How YOU benefit from donating

Donations from inidviduals are tax deductible under Section 18A of the Income Tax Act.

If you are donating as a company, offering bursaries can improve your Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) score. Your company’s skills development spending is required to be 2.5% of its annual payroll. Bursaries to black South Africans studying at institutions such as Nelson Mandela University, which are registered with the Department of Higher Education, count as part of this spending.

Every bit helps

We are appealing to YOU to help us achieve our goal. We cannot do it on our own.

Donations add up. If 5000 people each donated R100 a month, Nelson Mandela University’s needy students would benefit from an injection of R6 million a year.

If you have any questions, no matter the size of the donation you are considering giving, we are ready to help. Please contact us on Giving@mandela.ac.za