Johannesburg, South Africa – 23 October 2025 – Teraco: A Digital Realty company and provider of interconnection platforms and vendor-neutral colocation data centres, today announced a five-year support grant extension to the South African Broadband Education Networks (SABEN) via the Teraco Connect Foundation.
In 2020, Teraco signed a five-year grant, which the company has now extended for a further five years to 2030 worth a cumulative R17.5 million. The funding from Teraco will support the national drive by SABEN to end bandwidth poverty among schools and public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges in South Africa.
SABEN is a non-profit company, part of South Africa’s National Research and Education Network (NREN), serving as the sole provider of these services to public TVET colleges across the country.
SABEN currently serves approximately 450 000 students across 267 campuses and 46 colleges. It is purpose-built to solve the digital requirements of these sectors. The Teraco Connect Foundation grant will enable these educational institutions to access content directly and assist in laying essential foundations for future digital strategies.
Garth Scholtz, SABEN general manager, says, “Thanks to Teraco’s generous support, we are equipped to continue improving the digital transformation potential of each institution, which SABEN can support adequately.
“Our ultimate beneficiaries are the students. We aim to position ourselves as a conduit to the various classroom technologies that can be built on our scalable platform of digital solutions through the NREN services offering or serving as a thought leader on related technologies. We see ourselves playing a large role in building future capacity in the sector, which would not only help the colleges to help themselves better, but hopefully retain the skills in the public sector where they are so desperately needed.”
The grant extension provides SABEN with a physical presence in Teraco data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. It also provides colleges with connectivity to Platform Teraco where they benefit from direct access to a rich ecosystem of content and cloud service providers, enabling efficient connections to education cloud services, streaming, and remote learning possibilities.
Jan Hnizdo, Teraco CEO, says the grant will help facilitate the changing landscape of education in South Africa. Digital infrastructure initiatives, including remote learning and educational streaming, will become more efficient and easier to implement.
“The Teraco Connect Foundation sees the grant as an investment in the future of this country at a time when all sectors are facing significant challenges. As a leading data centre infrastructure provider, we are proud to invest in education, one of the most important cornerstones to secure the future growth and development of all South Africans.”
Scholtz says it is vital for SABEN to support all endeavours, and to put systems and structures in place that level the playing field for all South Africans.
“Collaboration with industry is key, and the grant extension from Teraco will assist us in meeting the evolving digital requirements of all the institutions. South Africa’s skills shortage cannot be addressed unless our education system produces a labour force with the right skills to meet the industry’s demand.
“Poverty and inequality can never be eliminated unless the next generation of previously disadvantaged citizens is economically empowered. The role of all these educational institutions will play a significant role and, as SABEN, we need to ensure that this journey is fully enabled.”
About Teraco
Teraco, a leading carrier-neutral colocation provider in Africa, is the first provider of highly resilient, vendor-neutral data environments in sub-Saharan Africa. With its world-class data centre infrastructure and network-dense ecosystems, Teraco forms a vital part of the African internet’s backbone and is essential to the modern enterprise’s digital transformation strategy. Teraco is majority-owned by Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR) – offering customers a global data centre platform designed to enable digital businesses to scale within a highly connected data community across 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents – and a consortium of private equity investors, including Berkshire Partners LLC and Permira. For more information, please visit teraco.co.za or follow us on LinkedIn and X.
About SABEN
SABEN procures high capacity access networks that connect public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges to South Africa’s National Research and Education Network (SANReN). The non-profit company works directly with SANReN and the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET) to provide high capacity bandwidth for TVET colleges. SABEN offers other digital solutions such as hosting, VOIP and Wi-Fi services. SABEN was initially launched in 2015 as a project by TENET to assist colleges self-fund connections to SANReN. It has since been launched as a separate company.
