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False qualifications damage the South African economy in several ways: they reduce productivity, increase expenditure, damage reputation, undermine confidence in the education system and reduce tax revenues. Governments and businesses need to tackle this problem, particularly by enforcing existing restrictions, improving the quality of education and training, setting up a centralized system for verifying qualifications and applying sanctions against those offering false certificates.

Ethical bodies in Sub-Saharan Africa face challenges in their capacity to perform their work due to a lack of ICT resources and academic training in ethics and regulatory affairs. €1.5 million (about US$1.62 million) has been granted to Benin, the Gambia, and Ivory Coast to install the Research for Health and Innovation Organiser software, a cloud-based platform that could make the work of such bodies more efficient while enabling them to improve ethical conduct and research integrity, review processes, build capacities in oversight and monitoring.

The Department of Basic Education has finalised the terms of reference for the task team that will investigate allegations of selling of posts within the sector. The names of the task team members will be announced once the proposed list has been gazetted. Basic Education Minister established the task team after recent media reports alleging that some posts in the education sector were sold for cash.

The committee set up in March last year by the Education Minister to investigate racism and sexism in higher education has revealed that discrimination was pervasive despite all the good policies generated by the institutions. The committee believes that the racism persists in higher education mostly because of the weakness of the institutions' information dissemination: it recommended the creation of a transformation compact which will help to oversight the institutions to sensitize staff to the different needs of students from various cultural and economic backgrounds.

People in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have been found buying fake degrees of all sorts from diploma mills and other bogus universities. Those universities have no physical existence and operate only through websites. Most diploma mills are operating from Britain or United States where academic standards are presumed to be very high. Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations compiled a list of over 10,000 persons who obtained fake degrees from diploma mills in USA. A significant number of them are from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Currently, there are about 80 notorious diploma mills that operate from the United States and the UK.

A 31-year-old junior clerk in the Eastern Cape Department of Education was arrested by the Joint Anti-Corruption Task Team for allegedly defrauding the department of more than R37 000. He had fraudulently deposited the monthly salary of a retired teacher into a bank account. The Director of communication mentions that his suspension illustrates the department's commitment to eradicating all forms of corruption and running a clean administration.