The FirstRand Empowerment Foundation is the philanthropic arm of FirstRand Limited, the banking group behind First National Bank (FNB), RMB, and WesBank. It runs its bursary programme independently of FNB's own graduate-recruitment bursaries, through the bursary administrator StudyTrust.
The Foundation funds first-year Black South African students specifically because it targets the point of greatest dropout risk - the transition from Matric into university - rather than backing students who have already proven they can survive a few years of tertiary study. Its income-band cut-off (R700,000 combined household income) is set deliberately high to capture the "missing middle": families too well-off for full NSFAS funding but still unable to comfortably afford university.
Unlike FNB's own graduate bursaries, this Foundation bursary carries no employment work-back obligation - it is structured as broad-based skills investment in Commerce, Engineering, and Science/Technology, not as a recruitment pipeline into the bank itself.
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