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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.
Historic Global exchange summit for first-year students in 2012
2011-10-21
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More than one hundred Kovsie first-year students travelled to universities in the USA and Europe in September 2011 to learn about issues such as diversity, leadership and citizenship. More students will travel to Asia in January 2012. Daniel King, Melissa Lucas, Jomari de Beer and Rito Madingana visited Ghent University in Belgium.
Photo: Anja Aucamp |
Our University will present a global exchange partner summit next year with the 16 partner universities who took part in this year’s Leadership for Change Programme. This will be the first summit of its kind presented in South Africa bringing together first-year students from four continents and 17 countries. The summit will take place from 8 - 22 July 2012 on the Bloemfontein Campus.
The aim of the summit is for first-year students from all partner universities in the USA, Europe and Asia to visit our university and experience student life at a South African university. The students will be staying on campus and an intensive programme covering issues such as social justice, diversity, leadership and citizenship will be presented.
Mr Rudi Buys, Dean of Student Affairs at our university, says the summit will serve as an opportunity to detail further partnership agreements with a number of universities such as Binghamton State University, amongst others.