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01 March 2019 | Story Valentino Ndaba
Student from the Umoja Buddy programme
Students from all corners of the globe forge lasting bonds through the Umoja Buddy Programme.

Let’s say you find yourself attending a university in a different country where you need to adjust to a new language, culture, environment, friends, lecturers, curriculum, and lifestyle. Sounds like a challenging leap of faith, right? However, the Umoja Buddy Programme (UBP) makes this transition a whole lot easier for international students.

If you were an international student at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein Campus, you would be assigned a buddy who is familiar with student life and community. The Office for International Affairs in collaboration with Student Affairs designed this programme for all incoming exchange students to feel welcome and at home.

The UBP is part of the university’s endeavours to advance internationalisation at home, which was entrenched in the 2018-2022 UFS Internationalisation Strategy. Underlying is the idea to provide UFS students with international experiences on their home campus.

Integration at the heart of internationalisation


At the Bloemfontein Campus launch of the UBP on 14 February 2019, UFS Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Francis Petersen, welcomed this year’s cohort of first-time international students and highlighted the importance of the UBP. “In essence, it aims to connect international and local students through meaningful lifelong friendships and to foster their academic, social and cultural integration at the UFS,” he said.

Prof Petersen strongly believes in the programme’s ability to facilitate “cross-fertilisation of ideas and intercultural exposure and learning”, which further enhances the quality of graduates produced by the institution.

A student is a student through other students


Lesotho-born Precious Lesupi volunteered as one of the 48 ambassadors to prevent others from experiencing the difficulties she did when she arrived at UFS. “I have been in a situation where you get to a place and you know nothing about the people there, especially the culture, and the way everything is done because you come from a totally different place, so it’s really hard to adjust.”

Lebohang Lesenyeho, who hails from Botshabelo in the Free State, expressed similar sentiments with fellow ambassador,Kweku Gavor. He said he “looks forward to “building a meaningful relationship.” Kweku who has Ghanaian origins believes that, “you cannot put a price on learning about another person and ways you react to certain situations.”


Umoja is a verb


True to the word umoja, which means “unity and the spirit of togetherness”, the programme has proved to bring together students from diverse backgrounds in the pursuit of academic excellence. The goal can be best achieved when complemented by a holistic social and cultural experience.

News Archive

Plant-strengthening agent enhances natural ability of plants to survive
2015-07-27

Drought, diseases, and fungi. These are factors that farmers have no control over, and they often have to watch despondently as their crops are damaged. In addition, the practice of breeding plants in special and strictly-controlled conditions, has resulted in crops losing the chemical ability to protect themselves in nature.

Researchers in the Department of Soil, Crop, and Climate Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS) have developed an organic agent that restores this chemical imbalance in plants. It enables the plant to build its own resistance against mild stress factors, and thus ensures increased growth and yield by the plant.

ComCat®, a plant-strengthening agent, is the result of extensive research by the German company, Agraforum AG, together with the UFS. Commercialisation was initially limited to Europe, while research was done at the UFS.

“Plants have become weak because they were grown specially and in isolation. They can’t protect themselves any longer,” says Dr Elmarie van der Watt from the department.

Dr Van der Watt says that, in nature, plants communicate by means of natural chemicals as part of their resistance mechanisms towards various stress conditions. These chemicals enable them to protect themselves against stress conditions, such as diseases and fungi (biotic conditions) or wind and droughts (abiotic conditions).

Most wild plant varieties are usually well-adapted to resist these stress factors. However, monoculture crops have lost this ability to a large extent.

The European researchers extracted these self-protection chemicals from wild plants, and made them available to the UFS for research and development.

“This important survival mechanism became dormant in monoculture crops. ComCat® wakes the plant up and says ‘Hey, you should start protecting yourself’.”

Research over the last few years has shown that the agent, applied mostly as a foliar spray, subsequently leads to better seedlings, as well as to growth, and yields enhancement of various crops. This is good news for the agricultural sector as it does not induce unwanted early vegetative growth that could jeopardise the final yield ? as happened in the past for nitrogen application at an early growth stage.

“The use of synthetic agents, such as fungicides which contain copper, are now banned. Nowadays, options for natural and organic agriculture is being investigated. This product is already widely used in Europe, but because farmers are often swamped by quacks, the South African market is still somewhat sceptical.”

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