This scholarship is gold
Students praise AngloGold Ashanti Scholarship for giving them so much more than just money.
From ‘touching’ academic exclusion to pursuing a PhD, the Wits AngloGold Ashanti Legacy Scholarship Endowment is already making a lasting impact.
“With the stress of no funding and being at the point of exclusion, the Scholarship came at just the right moment. It’s been a game-changer for me and changed the trajectory of my career,” says Adwell Maphothoma, an honours student in Mathematics Education, adding that he never dreamt beyond an undergraduate degree and is now working hard towards his PhD.
Maphothoma and his fellow scholarship awardees recently attended the AngloGold Ashanti Careers Day, which is part of this multifaceted scholarship that supports students beyond financial support.
“The most important thing is the support system. The casual meetups, checking in on us to see how we are doing after every semester, and boot camps to assess our academic progress, and building friendships. That follow-up is very important because with other scholarships or bursaries, you usually only have financial support, says Princess Malesa, fourth-year B.Ed. in Mathematics and Sign Language student.
Launched in 2024, the R87,5 million Wits AngloGold Ashanti Legacy Scholarship Endowment will benefit about 200 eligible students over five to seven years. It offers comprehensive funding and support over the duration of their studies to eligible students from disadvantaged and rural families with links to the mining industry and AngloGold Ashanti’s former gold mines in South Africa.
“It is important for AngloGold Ashanti to target academically promising students in rural communities who come from mining communities, as well as descendants of ex-miners who worked for AngloGold. We support undergraduate or postgraduate studies in high-impact areas where critical skills are required, and not just in engineering, but also in fields such as health, education, science, law, social sciences and others, so that they can plough back into their communities,” says Ambassador Baso Sangqu, Senior Vice President of the company.
The scholarship is part of a larger investment in legacy projects in education and agriculture, and demonstrates AngloGold Ashanti’s commitment to South Africa, its employees and its communities.
AngloGold Ashanti and Wits University share a deep, intertwined history, jointly playing a major role in the development of South Africa’s mining industry over the past century.
Says Jerome September, Dean of Students: “At Wits, we are working to create an institution where money should not determine your access to quality education. It is these kinds of partnerships that help us realise those ambitions.”
He adds that what makes this scholarship, in particular, very special is that it also has a programme within the University context, which is the wrap-around support.
“This is a special funder who not only writes checks but who is interested in walking the journey of success with the students, holding and empowering students along the way — on the one hand to ensure they succeed in their courses, but linked to that is also to prepare them for the world beyond the institution.”
“What that does, in the way the wrap-around support is set up, is that it allows the student to also leave the comfort zone of their own discipline. While some of the support is discipline-specific, much of the interaction and workshopping is also across disciplines,” he says.
[SRC] https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/general-news/2025/2025-09/this-scholarship-is-gold.html