A donor-funded food bank at the University of Cape Town has supported more than 70 students since 2024. This year, 48 students are using it, founder Mohammed Kajee said.
Student Outreach and Support, known as SOS, opens four days a week for an hour at lunch. Students can pick up whatever they need. Kajee said many of them have problems with their funding from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).
“If it wasn’t for this initiative, I was definitely not going to be here today,” former student Gladwin Ngobeni said. “I would have quit a long time ago.”
Ngobeni said NSFAS stopped funding him because his family was said to earn more than R350,000 a year. His mother and stepfather are unemployed. He gathered tax records and other papers to prove this while studying computer science.
He used the food bank from 2024 until he graduated in 2026 with a Bachelor of Science. He now works full-time as a software engineer.
Kajee is the science faculty’s student development officer. He said he started SOS after seeing that some failing students also had no reliable access to food. He said one student had not eaten in ten days. Kajee drove the student to buy groceries.
The food bank helped about seven students in its first year. Kajee paid for most of it himself, with some donations from staff, friends and family. He now runs it with student volunteers. The science faculty officially recognises SOS, but it is independent of the university.
Kajee said some students lost funding for “dodgy” reasons. In his latest case, a student lost her NSFAS money after her mother’s pension payout of about R300,000. The payout was flagged as taking the household over the income ceiling.
He said other students lost funding when their profiles disappeared from the NSFAS system. Others send their NSFAS money home to help pay for school fees and food. GroundUp said NSFAS had not answered its questions by the time of publication.
UCT said its own programme, set up in 2018, gave monthly grocery packs to 2,315 students this year. UCT said the programme depends on donations. Kajee said those groceries were often not enough.
Olufunke Alaba is a senior lecturer at UCT’s School of Public Health. Alaba has researched food insecurity on campus since 2024. “It affects concentration and memory,” Alaba said of hunger.
Matume Lethwane graduated in March and started using the food bank in his final year. He said hunger had made it hard to study. “I knew that I didn’t have to stress about food. I could stress about academics at last,” Lethwane said.
SOS has raised just over R26,700 of its R100,000 goal for 2026 through BackaBuddy. In August, the Lilah Foundation began donating 30 food packs a month. SOS was also given a deep freezer. Kajee said he hopes it will let SOS offer fruit, vegetables, bread and meat by 2027.
Source: this article is based on reporting by GroundUp. Image: GroundUp. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice News desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Kgomotso Maake covers news and politics for Tzaneen Voice. Kgomotso reports on government, Parliament, municipalities, courts, crime and service delivery across South Africa, with a close eye on how national decisions reach towns like Tzaneen and the wider Limpopo province. Stories are written in plain English and focus on the facts: who made the decision, what it means, and what happens next.