Santam

Santam is South Africa's largest short-term insurer, providing personal and commercial insurance products across the country from its head office in Bellville, Cape Town, and operating as part of the Sanlam group. Its scale gives it an ongoing need for specialist skills — actuarial, underwriting, data, and risk expertise — that are in chronically short supply in the South African insurance market.

Santam's bursary programme is built to address that shortage directly, funding students in fields that feed the short-term insurance industry: actuarial science, data science, underwriting, risk management, finance, engineering, mathematics, and even agriculture, relevant to Santam's agricultural insurance book. The programme, run partly in partnership with the graduate-development organisation StudyTrust, targets second-, third-, and final-year undergraduates as well as students entering Honours or postgraduate diplomas, generally requiring a minimum academic average of around 65%, and provides holistic support intended to let students focus on their studies rather than their finances.

Santam's bursary is generally structured as a work-back scheme: recipients are typically expected to commit to working for Santam, or one of its industry partners, for a period after graduation in exchange for the funding received, though the exact length and terms of that commitment vary by award and should be confirmed in the individual bursary contract rather than assumed to be uniform.