When the Department of Higher Education flagged a multi-million-rand fraud issue across its learning authorities, W&RSeta chief information officer Barnabas Masekwameng turned to the youth for a solution. Discover how an intensive 66-hour coding challenge helped authorities identify “ghost learners” and put an end to double-dipping.
Up until last year, the Department of Higher Education and Training had thousands of people fraudulently enrolling for multiple learnerships across its different sector education and training authorities (Setas). The practice, known as double-dipping, previously cost the department millions.
After the Higher Education Department and the Auditor-General South Africa flagged the issue with all 21 Setas, W&RSeta, through its ICT unit led by the CIO Barnabas Masekwameng, took a unique approach to address the double-dipping that would save his organisation and the Seta’s millions.
In December 2025, Barnabas led the first of its kind W&RSeta hackathon featuring young unemployed graduates and SMMEs to curb fraudulent activities.
“There were two use cases that needed to be addressed by the hackathon – double-dipping and ID verification of students when enrolling with learning institutions,” explains Barnabas.
ID verification proved to be a crucial step when verifying applicants. Authorities uncovered hundreds of accounts that proved to be “ghost learners” and, more shockingly, using details of deceased people to fraudulently acquire stipends and bursaries meant for poor students.
“During registration there wasn’t a system to verify a student’s identity with an institution such as the Department of Home Affairs, therefore you ended up just having a name of a student, without corresponding ID validation,” says Barnabas.
Barnabas says they eventually managed to get an agreement with TransUnion which allows W&RSeta to plug into their system for ID verification.
Hackathon saves the day
The ultimate highlight for Barnabas was the way these two critical issues were solved through the hackathon. “Issuing a tender could have turned into a multi-million rand project,” explains Barnabas.
Instead, hackathon competitors were challenged to come up with digital solutions for both these problems within 66 hours.
The W&RSeta hackathon proved to be a powerful showcase of creativity, teamwork and problem-solving among the youth.
“These young people participated in over 60 hours of coding and programming and gave us different solutions and code that solved for ID verification and the double-dipping. Their solutions were top of the class,” exclaims Barnabas.
“The solution to ID verification was solved by plugging into our learner management system, however the code to solve for double-dipping required that we plug into the Department of Higher Education as they have an overall view of all the Setas.”
This enabled authorities to quickly pick up if students are registering with more than one Seta.
Barnabas says that the greatest lesson learnt from this initiative is that while there are often complaints of a shortage of skills in South Africa, the talent that came out of the hackathon proved otherwise.
“We have incredible skills available that we just need to tap into, via incubation and other skills development programmes that we can host in our companies in-house,” he concludes.
