A matric result shouldn’t decide a future alone.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of South African school-leavers make the biggest decision of their lives with almost no information. Prospectus exists to close that gap — turning a set of marks into every path it could open.
The information gap is the real barrier.
South Africa doesn’t have a shortage of programmes, or even a shortage of funding. It has a shortage of information reaching the right student at the right time.
A learner in a rural Limpopo school and a learner at a well-resourced city school can have the same marks and the same potential — but wildly different odds of knowing that an Extended-curriculum degree exists, that they qualify for several bursaries, or that their APS opens a door they never knew was there.
One profile. Every path it unlocks.
You enter your marks once. From that single profile, Prospectus calculates your APS, ranks every programme you qualify for across every public institution, matches you to the funding you’re actually eligible for, and maps the careers your capabilities point toward.
Then it lets you apply — to as many as you like — reusing your documents so the tenth application takes as long as the first used to. Free for students, forever.
Four things we won’t compromise.
Students never pay
The core platform is free and always will be. We earn from institutions and funders who pay only when we route a qualified application — never from the student, and never by selling data.
Honest matches
A sponsored listing never outranks a better-fit one. Match scores reflect your profile and the programme’s reality — not who paid us. Every paid placement is visibly tagged.
Every pathway is real
Direct, Extended, Foundation, TVET — we treat them as routes, not rankings. The right path is the one that fits the student, not the one that looks best on paper.
Privacy by default
Your information is yours. We only share it when you apply somewhere, you can take that back, and we hold minors’ data to a higher bar — as POPIA requires and as decency demands.
Built in South Africa, for South Africa.
The question
Two former admissions officers and an engineer kept seeing the same thing: capable students making blind choices. They started mapping every programme in the country into one structured index.
The index
Every public university and TVET college, tagged by APS, subject, language, pathway and fees — the data layer everything else is built on.
Funding joins
NSFAS plus private funders indexed and matched. The first students discover they qualify for far more than they thought.
The platform
Matching, applications, the career explorer and the student dashboard go live, with the first universities connected.
Small team, stubborn mission.
We’re a small group of people who’ve sat on both sides of the admissions desk. We answer our own email.
Naledi Khumalo
Spent a decade inside university admissions. Runs the relationships with universities and TVET colleges.
Themba Dlamini
Former bursary officer. Built and maintains the funding index, and works with funders and employers.
Thandeka Nkosi
Leads the matching engine and is accountable for how every student’s data is handled under POPIA.
Your marks are the start.
See every programme, every bursary, and every career your results could open — in about a minute, for free.