Abstract
This study examined data protection requirements that can be used as guidelines for higher education institutions to comply with the POPI Act. To answer this question, a systematic review was used to analyse articles based on the POPI Act. The Results indicate that there are several key definitions related to the POPI Act that enable a higher education institution to formulate its POPI Act compliance policy such as Data protection and Personal information. The POPI Act sets out guidelines concerning access to and processing of any individual data. The level of compliance with this change is crucial and both private and public organizations need to adhere to such protection implementation. The Act characterizes processing as collecting, getting, recording, organizing, recovering, or the utilize conveyance, or sharing of personal information. POPIA and data protection are both key themes that the research team picked up in the content that they analysed to formulate this paper; these themes encapsulate a group of keywords that were identified in the documents that have been used in this study. This paper thus aims to provide insightful knowledge into the South African implementation of the POPI Act compliance within higher education institutions pre covid.