Last verified: 31 August 2026
You finished an LLB in Nairobi, Accra, Lusaka or Johannesburg, you want to spend the next few years working on land rights or housing rights properly rather than in your spare time, and you need someone to pay for it. That is the exact reader the NRF SARChI Chair in Equality, Law and Social Justice at the University of the Witwatersrand is looking for in its 2027 funding round. The call is open to South Africans and to citizens of other African countries, it funds both a masters (LLM) and a doctorate (PhD), and the money is meaningful. It is also narrower than most scholarship calls you will read this year, and the two rules that decide whether you can apply at all are worth checking before you write a single line of a proposal.
The two rules that decide everything
Most funding calls bury the disqualifiers. This one puts them near the top, and they are unusually strict.
Rule one: your average. You need a minimum of 65% in your previous degree, meaning your LLB if you are applying for the LLM, or your LLM if you are applying for the PhD. There is no flexibility signalled anywhere in the call. Below 65% and the application does not have a route through.
Rule two: your age. The call sets a ceiling of 30 years for LLM applicants and 32 years for PhD applicants in 2027. Age caps are common on National Research Foundation linked funding in South Africa, but they still catch people out, particularly applicants who worked for a few years before returning to study or who took time out between degrees.
Both rules are absolute in the way the call is written. Everything else in this article assumes you clear them.
What the SARChI Chair actually is
SARChI stands for the South African Research Chairs Initiative, a National Research Foundation programme that funds senior academics to build long term research capacity in a defined field. A Chair is not a scholarship office. It is a research programme with a supervisor, an agenda and a set of questions it is trying to answer, and the postgraduate funding exists so that students can help answer them.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. When you apply here you are not applying for a general purpose law scholarship that lets you study whatever you like at Wits. You are applying to join a specific research programme on equality, law and social justice, under the supervision of the Chair, on a topic that sits inside its agenda. Applicants who treat the call like an open scholarship and submit a proposal on, say, competition law or corporate governance, are writing themselves out on the first page.
The five research areas your proposal must sit inside
The 2027 call names the areas it wants to fund. Your research proposal needs to belong to one of them, clearly and without stretching:
- Intergenerational equity and women’s land rights
- The impact of intergenerational injustice on the right to housing
- Contributions of African regional bodies to the development and enforcement of economic, social and cultural rights
- The role of economic, social and cultural rights in addressing inequalities among vulnerable groups in Africa
- Advancing equality and social change through the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights
Read that list twice. It has a clear centre of gravity: economic, social and cultural rights, African regional human rights machinery, and inequality as a lived material problem rather than an abstract one. Land, housing, courts, vulnerable groups. If your interests already live in that space, this call is close to tailor made. If they do not, there will be better calls for you, and forcing a fit is the most common way strong applicants waste a September.
A practical note on choosing among the five. Two of them, women’s land rights and the right to housing, are framed around intergenerational questions, which is a specific analytical lens rather than a general topic heading. If you choose one of those, your proposal should show that you understand what intergenerational equity means as a legal argument and not just that you can write about land or housing.
Also Check: Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships 2027/2028
What the bursaries are worth, and what the call does not tell you
Here are the figures as the call states them. Note the word approximately, which is the call’s own wording and not a hedge added here.
PhD bursaries
- Approximately R200,000 for applicants with a 75% average or above
- Approximately R150,000 for applicants averaging 65% to 74%
LLM bursaries
- Approximately R190,000 for applicants with a 75% average or above
- Approximately R145,000 for applicants averaging 65% to 74%
Two things are worth saying plainly, because they change how you should plan.
First, the higher band is not a bonus for excellence tacked on at the end. It is a difference of R50,000 for the PhD and R45,000 for the LLM, decided by a threshold you cannot change after the fact. If your transcript sits just under 75%, that is simply your band, and it is better to know that going in than to build a budget on the top figure.
Second, this call describes the money as funding to be held toward the degree. It does not publish a breakdown between tuition and living costs, and it does not state whether the amount is per year of study or for the award overall. Nobody should describe this as a fully funded package on the strength of what the page says, and you should not plan a move to Johannesburg on the assumption that the figure stretches to cover everything. Before you accept anything, ask the office three questions in writing: is this amount annual or total, what is it expected to cover, and what will I be invoiced separately for. A good research office will answer that in a paragraph, and the answer is the difference between a comfortable two years and a stressful one.
The full time and supervision condition
You must study full time at Wits University, in Johannesburg, under the supervision of the Chair. This rules out distance study, it rules out fitting a doctorate around a full legal practice, and it means relocating if you are not already in Gauteng.
For applicants from other African countries, that condition carries the most practical weight in the whole call. It means being physically present in Johannesburg for the length of the degree, which in turn means a study visa. South African study permit processing is rarely quick, and the notification timeline described below leaves a workable window rather than a generous one, so gather your civil documents while your application is still under review instead of afterwards.
Also Check: Sydney Research Training Program (RTP) International Scholarship 2027
The application pack
Six items, and the call is explicit that incomplete applications will not be considered. Assemble them as a single set before you start writing anything else.
- A covering letter explaining your interest in the bursary
- A research proposal of one to two pages
- A copy of your identity document or passport
- Your curriculum vitae
- Full academic records
- Contact details for two academic referees
Three of those six are documents you request from other people or institutions, which is where timelines break. Full academic records from a university registry can take days or weeks, particularly if you graduated some years ago or the institution is in another country. Request them the day you decide to apply, not the week of the deadline.
Writing a proposal that fits in two pages
The two page limit is the hardest part of this application and it is where most applicants lose ground. Two pages is not enough room for a literature review, so do not attempt one. What a selection panel needs to see in that space is roughly this:
- A question, not a topic. “Women’s land rights in Zambia” is a topic. “Whether customary succession reforms in Zambia have changed what widows actually inherit, and why implementation has diverged from the statute” is a question. Questions can be answered in a thesis. Topics cannot.
- The link to the Chair’s agenda, stated openly. Name the research area from the list that your work sits in. Do not make the reader infer it.
- A method you can actually carry out. If your design depends on interviewing judges, say how you would reach them. If it depends on case law and archives, say which courts and which years. Panels are quietly assessing feasibility, and a plan that cannot be executed in the time available reads as inexperience.
- Why it matters now. One short paragraph connecting your question to a live problem in African equality law. This is the part that turns a competent proposal into a memorable one.
- Nothing else. No padding, no long quotations, no restating the call back at the panel.
Write it, then cut a third of it. The version that survives that cut is almost always the stronger one.
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The covering letter is not a formality
Applicants tend to spend their energy on the proposal and produce the covering letter in twenty minutes the night before. That is a mistake here, because the call asks specifically for a letter explaining your interest in the bursary, which is an invitation to say something the proposal cannot.
Use it to explain the through line. Why this field, why this Chair, what in your work or your life brought you to questions about land, housing or inequality, and what you intend to do afterwards. Keep it to a page. Avoid the register of a job application. A panel reading forty applications remembers the person who sounded like a researcher with a reason, not the person who listed adjectives.
Referees: choose people who can say something specific
You are asked for contact details rather than sealed letters, which means the burden shifts to you in an easily missed way. Two things follow from that.
Pick academics who taught you closely enough to comment on your research ability, not the most senior name you can find. A professor who supervised your LLB research essay is worth far more than a dean who graded you once in a class of two hundred.
Then tell them. Ask permission, send them your proposal and your covering letter, and give them the deadline. Being contacted cold about a student you barely remember produces a lukewarm reference, and lukewarm is fatal in a competitive round.
Dates, submission and what happens next
- Applications close: 30 September 2026. The call does not publish a closing time, so treat the deadline as the start of that day rather than the end of it.
- Send applications to: Judy Mafika, judy.mafika@wits.ac.za
- Enquiries: Professor Cathi Albertyn, cathi.albertyn@wits.ac.za, or Professor Lilian Chenwi, lilian.chenwi@wits.ac.za
- Outcome: applicants should expect notification by the end of October 2026
- Study begins: 2027
That one month turnaround from closing to notification is fast by scholarship standards and it is a genuine advantage. It means you know your position before most other 2027 funding rounds have closed, which leaves room for a second application elsewhere if this one does not land.
The call also states clearly that incomplete or late applications will not be considered. That sentence is doing real work. It means an application missing an academic record, or arriving on 1 October, is not read at all, however good the proposal is. Send everything at once, in one email, with the documents clearly named.
Costs, agents and a warning worth repeating
There is no application fee mentioned anywhere in this call, and applications go directly to a named university staff member at a wits.ac.za address. Nobody should ever be paid to submit this application on your behalf, and any person or page asking you for money to secure a Wits bursary is not connected to the university. Send your documents yourself, to the address published by the university, and keep the sent email.
If you receive a message about this bursary from an address that is not a wits.ac.za one, check it against the official page before replying with personal documents. Scholarship fraud follows deadlines, and late September is exactly when it appears.
Frequently asked questions
I turn 31 during 2027 and I am applying for the LLM. Am I out?
The call places the limit at 30 for the LLM in 2027, which reads as a cap you must be under, but it does not spell out whether it is assessed at the point of application, at registration, or across the calendar year. If you are within a year of the ceiling either way, do not decide this yourself and do not assume the generous reading. Email Judy Mafika or one of the two professors, state your date of birth and the degree you are applying for, and ask for a direct yes or no. It costs one email and it saves weeks.
My transcript shows classes or a grade point average, not a percentage. How will the 65% be judged?
The call assumes a percentage average, which is standard across South African and much of African legal education but not everywhere. If your degree was graded on a class system, a division, or a four point scale, do not convert it yourself on the application. Ask your awarding university for an official transcript that includes a percentage equivalent or a formal grading key, and attach that key with your academic records. Panels are reasonable about unfamiliar systems, but only when the conversion comes from the institution rather than the applicant.
Do I need an offer of admission from Wits before I apply for the bursary?
The call describes a funding application sent to the Chair, not a university admission application, and it does not set out an admissions process alongside it. In practice a bursary and a place on a degree programme are separate decisions made by different parts of a university, and holding one does not automatically give you the other. Ask the contacts whether you should be applying for admission to the LLM or PhD in parallel this year, because if the answer is yes, that process has its own documents and its own dates.
Can I hold this bursary at the same time as another award or a job?
The call does not address this, and that silence should not be read as permission. Many National Research Foundation linked awards restrict other funding or paid work, and the full time study condition here points in the same direction. If you already hold another award, or you plan to do part time work such as tutoring or research assistance, disclose it and ask about it before you accept anything. Discovering a conflict after registration is a far worse conversation than having it now.
Does the money cover flights, a study visa or family coming with me?
Nothing in the call mentions travel, visa costs, medical cover or dependants, so plan on the basis that it does not. For applicants relocating from outside South Africa, those costs are real and they arrive early, often before the first payment does. Build them into your own budget, ask the office what the payment schedule looks like, and know how you will cover the first two months.
If I am not selected this year, can I apply again for the following round?
The call says nothing about reapplication, and it does not describe any bar on applying again. What is worth knowing is that a SARChI Chair funds within a research agenda that shifts as projects complete, so a proposal rejected in one round may not fit the next round’s areas at all. If you are unsuccessful, ask whether feedback is available and whether the same research areas are expected to run again, then rebuild the proposal around what the Chair is funding next rather than resubmitting the same document.
The bottom line
This is a strong, specific opportunity for a fairly narrow group of people: African law graduates under the age cap, with a 65% average or better, whose interests genuinely sit inside economic, social and cultural rights, land, housing or African regional human rights bodies. For that group, funding of roughly R145,000 to R200,000 attached to an established research chair with named supervisors is a serious offer, and the fast decision timeline makes it low risk to try.
For everyone else, the honest answer is that this is not the call to stretch for. The eligibility rules are hard edges, not preferences.
If you are in the first group, do three things this week. Request your full academic records, because they take the longest. Email the office with any eligibility question you cannot answer from the call itself. Then write a two page proposal that names one of the five research areas in its opening paragraph and asks a question you could actually answer in a thesis. Applications close on 30 September 2026, and an incomplete file will not be read.
Official announcement: PhD and LLM bursary opportunities for 2027, Wits University School of Law
