UPDATE: NSF PAYMENT SYSTEM BACK ONLINE
NOTICE
15 May 2025
The National Skills Fund is not directly responsible for payment of beneficiaries’ stipends. Instead, it is the Skills Development Providers contracted under the National Skills Fund who are responsible for processing payments of stipends to beneficiaries.
The National Skills Fund’s payment system through the Department of Higher Education and Training’s Basic Accounting System (BAS) experienced technical problems intermittently over a period of time and during the week of 5 to 9 May 2025 the system was down.
It is because of these technical problems that there was a delay in payment to twenty (20) of the NSF Skills Development Providers who in turn couldn’t process payments of stipends to beneficiaries, timeously in some cases. The technical team including the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) responsible for BAS was deployed to recover the system.
While this delay had affected payments to the 20 skills development partners in the past week, we are happy to announce that the technical problems are now resolved, and the system is back in full function. This has allowed the NSF to immediately make payments to the Skills Development Providers which were affected by this problem, on Monday, 12 May 2025. Thus, the affected Skills Development Providers and host employers are in process or have processed stipend payments to beneficiaries.
This has been a huge inconvenience, particularly to the affected Skills Development Providers and especially NSF Funded beneficiaries and for this, we sincerely apologise.
The NSF has with immediate effect established a technical team including DHET and SITA to monitor the payment system, to detect and prevent BAS downtime. In the short to medium term as part of its digital strategy, the National Skills Fund has recently commenced with the reconfiguration of its Enterprise Resource Planning system to manage and streamline its core business processes, including the Finance Unit and payment system.
Where stipends are paid late, learners have a right to engage with their respective Skills Development Providers. We also want to remind learners that they have an obligation to fulfill all the terms and obligations outlined in their contract to ensure that all the requirements and responsibilities are met as specified.
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