The applicant was employed by the respondent, a donor-funded research support entity linked to the University of the Witwatersrand, from October 2014 and was promoted to Quality Assurance Officer in June 2015 within the Maternal, Adolescent and Child Health Research Unit. Her employment was linked to donor-funded projects, primarily the Female Condom Evaluation Project, which ended in March 2017 when its funding expired. She was issued with a section 189(3) notice and consulted regarding possible retrenchment. During consultations, she was temporarily placed on another project and was invited to apply and compete for alternative fixed-term positions (Quality Assurance Officer and Quality Assurance Administrator) on the ECO project. She was unsuccessful in the assessments and declined a lower-level alternative position offered to her. Her services were terminated on 31 April 2017, and she received severance and related payments. She challenged the retrenchment as substantively and procedurally unfair, contending that her post had not become redundant or that she should have been placed in a vacant Quality Assurance Officer position.