Help to find bursaries
NMMU alumni develop app to refine search
STUDENTS will have access to bursaries worth more than R1billion at the click of a button when a new mobile app launches today.
The app was developed by Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University alumni to help prospective and current university students find bursaries.
Punted as a “bursary matching webapp” for school leavers and undergraduate students, the smartphone application is designed to help students sift through thousands of bursaries on offer around the country in less than a 10th of the time it would usually take.
Operations manager for the SAScholar app, Tafadzwa Kachara, 26, who is in the final year of an LLB law degree at NMMU, said the idea for the app stemmed from his struggle to find a bursary to study his Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree in bio-chemistry and microbiology.
“For undergraduate qualifications there are a lot of funding opportunities but it is difficult to get your hands on them.” Kachara said an average bursary guide would contain more than 200 bursary opportunities from private companies and universities in PDF format but usually a student would only qualify for 10.
He developed the app to save time and frustration while looking for a bursary.
Kachara approached his former flatmate, Blessing Jonamu, to develop the app.
Kachara said Jonamu was in his final year for a masters degree in computer science at the time.
“We sat down and brainstormed the idea to figure out how we could develop such an app,” Kachara said.
He and Jonamu painstakingly created a database, which includes more than 7 000 bursaries across South Africa available to nearly every university countrywide.
“They include private company bursaries and university bursaries, even the NRF [National Research Foundation] bursaries are available on the app,” Kachara said.
The bursaries available through the app add up to more than R1-billion.
Kachara said the most challenging part of developing the app was getting all the information from the various institutions and organisations.
With the development process started in the middle of last year, Kachara said it took nearly a year to have the app publicly available.
The SAScholar app is designed in such a way that a user will create a profile including the qualification they are studying. The app will then sift through SAScholar database and return results which are applicable to that student.
“The service also allows scholars to save bursaries that they are interested in and the system will send them notifications when [they] are about to reach their deadline date,” Kachara said.
Making the app more accessible, Kachara and his team incorporated a community aspect, where schools can buy a licence from SAScholar which will allow any number of pupils to access the app.
“This is to allow schools from less privileged areas where scholars do not have access to the internet or smartphones to do searches for several scholars for a certain period of time.”
The app can also be licensed by companies or organisations on behalf of schools for greater access.
For more information about the app log on to www.sascholar.com .
The SAScholar team consists of director and brand manager Curwyn Mapaling, product manager and chief developer Blessing Jonamu, and operations manager Tafadzwa Kachara.