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01 January 2018

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. 

News Archive

UFS appoints honoured scholar
2010-08-16

Prof. Johann Neethling

The University of the Free State (UFS) has recently appointed Prof. Johann Neethling as a senior professor in the Faculty of Law. Prof. Neethling is a nationally and internationally recognised expert in the field of Private Law, which is also the department he will be joining.

Throughout his career, he has lectured at various universities in South Africa. He also received numerous awards, including a B1 rating as a researcher from the National Research Foundation (NRF). He enjoys considerable international recognition for his high quality research work and he is a leading international scholar in his field.

Prof. Neethling received various scholarships for research and overseas visits, the most prestigious being the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung scholarships for research on unlawful competition at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany. He also received a graduate fellowship from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has also been awarded an NRF grant of R80 000 per year to conduct research in Belgium and The Netherlands for the period 2009-2014. He will visit these countries in September this year. Prof. Neethling also received an open invitation from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to apply for a renewed stay in Germany at any time.

He is one of the 25 professors selected by Prof. Jonathan Jansen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, to enrich the various faculties at the university. Prof. Neethling will be based in Pretoria. His primary focus will be research outputs in conjunction with the Department of Private Law in the Faculty of Law at the UFS.

Media Release
Issued by: Mangaliso Radebe
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2828
Cell: 078 460 3320
E-mail: radebemt@ufs.ac.za  
16 August 2010

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