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After South Africa’s battle with the record-breaking drought of 2015, Prof Andries Jordaan from our Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa(DiMTEC) saw room for improvement in dealing with this kind of disaster.
Drought impact
Commercial farmers who are usually net exporters of food crops and communal farmers who own the bulk of the country’s livestock, were all hit hard in 2015. Most of the latter had no resources to spare as the drought progressed. The concern about the drought’s impact on the country’s food production and availability resulted in a joint goal of preventing food scarcity during future droughts.
Prof Jordaan’s visit to the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the US, several years ago prepared him to better equip communities in South Africa to deal with drought situations. “I recognised that in spite of the impact DiMTEC has been able to make on disaster preparedness, a gap remained in disaster response in South Africa.”
Sharing knowledge
In August this year Prof Jordaan again visited the NDMC. This time he requested a few key players in South Africa’s agriculture and disaster response communities to join him. With him were Janse Rabie, head of Natural Resources at AgriSA, a nonprofit organisation that functions as an interface between the government and about 28 000 South Africa farmers, and Moses Musiwale Khangale, director of Fire Services for the South African Ministry of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
The South African delegation met with and learnt from climatologists, geospatial technologists, and outreach and planning analysts.
Prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to Senior Researcher
2010-05-27
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| Ms Melody Mentz. |
Ms Melody Mentz, Ph.D. student and Senior Researcher at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Division for Student Development and Success (SDS) has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship award to work on her Ph.D. in the United States of America (USA). This award has only been granted to a limited number of students from the UFS in the past.
For the 12-month duration of the scholarship, Ms Mentz will be based at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. During this time she will be doing a part-time internship at the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute. Ms Mentz will also be completing doctoral level coursework in the School of Education’s Higher Education and Student Affairs programme. She intends to complete her Ph.D. thesis during her time abroad.
Both her Ph.D. and research work at SDS focus on factors influencing the success of students in South African higher education and the impact of student engagement on student success. More specifically, her Ph.D. focuses on how high-school experiences and expectations of higher education influence the success of first-year students at the UFS.
Ms Mentz completed her B.Com (Human Resource Management), as well as the rest of her postgraduate studies in Psychology at the UFS, obtaining all her qualifications with distinction. She was also the recipient of the Dean’s medal for the best honours student in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences in 2006, and the Kovsie Dux student of the year in 2005.
Ms Mentz will be departing for the USA during August of 2010.