Teraco has announced a five-year support grant extension to the South African Broadband Education Networks (SABEN) via the Teraco Connect Foundation.
In 2020, Teraco signed a five-year grant, which the company has now extended for a further five years to 2030 worth a cumulative R17,5-million. The funding from Teraco will support the national drive by SABEN to end bandwidth poverty among schools and public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges in South Africa.
SABEN is a non-profit company, part of South Africa’s National Research and Education Network (NREN), serving as the sole provider of these services to public TVET colleges across the country.
SABEN currently serves approximately 450 000 students across 267 campuses and 46 colleges. It is purpose-built to solve the digital requirements of these sectors. The Teraco Connect Foundation grant will enable these educational institutions to access content directly and assist in laying essential foundations for future digital strategies.
Garth Scholtz, SABEN GM, says: “Thanks to Teraco’s generous support, we are equipped to continue improving the digital transformation potential of each institution, which SABEN can support adequately.
“Our ultimate beneficiaries are the students. We aim to position ourselves as a conduit to the various classroom technologies that can be built on our scalable platform of digital solutions through the NREN services offering or serving as a thought leader on related technologies. We see ourselves playing a large role in building future capacity in the sector, which would not only help the colleges to help themselves better, but hopefully retain the skills in the public sector where they are so desperately needed.”
The grant extension provides SABEN with a physical presence in Teraco data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. It also provides colleges with connectivity to Platform Teraco where they benefit from direct access to a rich ecosystem of content and cloud service providers, enabling efficient connections to education cloud services, streaming, and remote learning possibilities.
Jan Hnizdo, Teraco CEO, says the grant will help facilitate the changing landscape of education in South Africa. Digital infrastructure initiatives, including remote learning and educational streaming, will become more efficient and easier to implement.
“The Teraco Connect Foundation sees the grant as an investment in the future of this country at a time when all sectors are facing significant challenges. As a leading data centre infrastructure provider, we are proud to invest in education, one of the most important cornerstones to secure the future growth and development of all South Africans.”