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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

André Roodt leads European Crystallographic Association
2012-08-30

Prof. André Roodt, newly-elected ECA president.
30 August 2012

 Prof. André Roodt, Chairperson of the Department of Chemistry, made history in being elected as the first non-European president of the European Crystallographic Association (ECA). He was elected as the new president of the ECA for 2012-2015 at the 27th European Crystallographic Meeting held in Bergen, Norway, recently.

Other members of the current Executive Committee are from the UK, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Russia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The ECA’s national membership includes more than 40 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and covers research on all aspect of pure and applied crystallography, including intersections with biology, earth sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry and materials science.

It is the first time since its inception more than 40 years ago the ECA has a non-European president, and in particular the first one from Africa.
 

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