SARAO

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) is a facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF), responsible for South Africa's radio astronomy infrastructure, including the MeerKAT telescope and the country's role in the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. SARAO operates some of the most advanced radio telescopes in the world, positioning South Africa as a global hub for astronomy and the engineering disciplines that support it.

Because world-class radio astronomy depends on more than astronomers alone, SARAO funds undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships across engineering and physical science fields - electronic, electrical, mechanical, mechatronic, and computer engineering, alongside physics, mathematics, and computer science - to build the technical pipeline its telescopes and data infrastructure need.

SARAO explicitly asks scholarship applicants to explain how their chosen degree connects to a career in radio astronomy, reflecting the organisation's goal of developing scientists and engineers who understand and want to work in the field, not just funding study in a loosely related discipline.