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27 August 2018 Photo Barend Nagel
WomenOfKovsies Arina Engelbrecht advocates healthy living nationally
Arina Engelbrecht’s vision is for all Kovsies to lead holistically healthy lives.

How do you start living a healthy lifestyle? Arina Engelbrecht, a wellness specialist in the Employee Wellness Division at the University of the Free State (UFS) says it only takes a few changes. Her passion is to motivate people to live a balanced life.  

Being active enables a person to live life to the full. “Aim to exercise 150 minutes a week, which equates to 30 minutes five times a week in order to experience health benefits like prevention of lifestyle illnesses, better sleeping patterns, decreasing stress or anxiety and feeling more energetic,” says Engelbrecht.

Some of the initiatives Engelbrecht and her team drive are the Healthy Lifestyle Challenge, Park Runs in Bloemfontein, and the Healthy4Life Pedometer Challenge, which encourage staff members to become more physically active. “Everything we do, think or feel is influenced by what we eat! It is therefore important to eat a balanced diet. Healthy food = quality fuel = good health = sustained energy = peak performance,” she explains. 
 
Pedometer Challenge

In the space of eight weeks 240 staff members from all campuses walked 54 000km as part of the Pedometer Challenge. Engelbrecht and her team mobilised 53 active teams from all three campuses. Three of these teams emerged as the winners as they exceeded the target of 1 300km which is the equivalent of walking to Cape Town. In September 2018 the Challenge is going national as the North-West University competes against UFS.

Celebrating women

This Women’s Month Engelbrecht’s message to women of Kovsies is: “We must start embracing who we are and start believing in ourselves, whether it is in the workplace, in business, or at home.” 

News Archive

International human development practitioners gather at first HDCA conference in Africa
2017-09-18

Description: HDCA read more Tags: Human Development and Capability Association, University of Cape Town, HDCA conference, Prof Melanie Walker 

The first HDCA annual conference on African soil was held at
UCT from 6 to 8 September 2017.


The Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) is a global community of academics and practitioners that seeks to build an intellectual community around the ideas of human development and the capability approach, and to relate these ideas to the policy arena and justice in the world. The association promotes research within many disciplines, ranging from economics to philosophy, development studies, health, education, law, government, sociology, and more. Members live in over 70 countries worldwide.

The HDCA’s conference is held annually; in 2017, the 17th international conference was held in Africa for the first time. Hosted by the Universities of Cape Town, the Free State (UFS), and the Western Cape, and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the meeting was held in Cape Town from 6 to 8 September 2017. The conference attracted outstanding global scholars, such as Profs Ravi Kanbur (Cornell), Martha Nussbaum (Chicago), Ingrid Robeyns (Utrecht), and Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University), among many others.

The conference theme was Challenging Inequalities: Human Development and Social Change, a particularly apt topic in the wake of Stats SA’s latest Poverty Report, which shows growing poverty and inequality in South Africa. Prof Melanie Walker, Director: Centre for Research on Higher Education and Development (CRHED) at the UFS, outgoing vice-president of the HDCA, and a member of the conference committee, led a group of researchers from CRHED, ten of whom were involved in presenting papers, while two former PhD students also presented their research. Overall, the quality of papers was very high, with Prof Nussbaum remarking that this was ‘the best HDCA conference’ she had attended.

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