AnaniTech Global

Billions are going up behind fences like this one — most people never learn what's inside. There is a security guard I used to pass on my way through Midrand who spent months standing outside a construction site behind a fence higher than most houses. I asked him once what was actually going up in there. He shrugged and said, "some kind of computer building for overseas companies." That "computer building" was almost certainly one of the data centre campuses now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and he had no idea the industry going up behind that fence was one he could realistically work in himself.

Different requirements, not necessarily different odds. A few years back I went looking for funding to grow AnaniTech Global into something bigger than a one-man Blogger site. I typed "SEFA loan requirements" into Google like thousands of South Africans do every month. Half the information I found was outdated. What I did not know at the time, and what most people searching that exact phrase still do not know, is that SEFA does not exist as its own agency anymore.

One shortlist, multiple consortium universities across Europe. Palesa applied to four South African universities in her matric year and got into three of them. NSFAS covered the fees. What nobody at her school ever mentioned was that there was a whole other list she never saw — scholarships that would have paid for her to study in Germany, the Netherlands, or Turkey, fully funded, without her family spending a single rand. She only found out about the NRF-DAAD route two years into her degree, from a lecturer who mentioned it in passing after a lecture. By then, the deadline for that year had already closed.