Support Teacher Empowerment Trust (STET)

Support Teacher Empowerment Trust (STET) is a South African non-profit trust focused on empowering Black South African women through education, technology and mentorship, with a particular emphasis on training future teachers. Its bursary programme funds undergraduate study, including STEM subjects such as coding, robotics, ICT, mathematics and science, for Black female students entering the teaching profession, paired with structured mentorship and skills-development support rather than tuition funding alone.

STET's stated motivation is to address South Africa's shortage of confident, digitally capable educators in these high-demand subjects and to help close the digital divide in under-resourced schools, while also using education as a route to advancing opportunities for Black women specifically. The Trust positions its bursary as a holistic teacher-development intervention intended to strengthen classroom teaching standards over the longer term, not simply a once-off grant, and it pairs funding with structured mentorship rather than leaving recipients to study in isolation. Publicly available information from STET does not set out a formal, contractually binding work-back obligation requiring recipients to teach for a set period after graduating; the programme's design and stated mission strongly point toward producing classroom teachers, but no explicit bonded service requirement is confirmed in material available to the public, so this should not be assumed by applicants.