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16 July 2020 | Story Valentino Ndaba
Add these emergency safety contacts to your speed dial.

Staying safe during the coronavirus pandemic extends to ensuring that students at the University of the Free State (UFS) are safe from crime. Crime in South Africa remains an unfortunate reality which continues to affect students, staff and the institution in general. 

“Crime requires constant vigilance from the community and this can only be achieved through initiatives that are aimed at informing the community on what to do and what not to do. To this end the BSafe Safety First flyer is geared at informing specifically the student community on safety measures that must be taken,” said Cobus van Jaarsveld, Assistant Director: Threat Detection, Investigations and Liaison at Protection Services.

The Safety First flyer is a guide for students to be crime-conscious whether at their accommodation, on the street, or in their vehicles. It also offers tips on how to act responsibly as far as alcohol and drugs are concerned.

Engaging students on their safety 

UFS Protection Services recently engaged with off-campus residence students in Bloemfontein in order to provide tips on how to stay safe in their neighbourhoods. During the engagement, the new Safety First pamphlets were distributed, and students were encouraged to join the Student Crime-Stop Brandwag WhatsApp group.

As from 15 June 2020, Nissi Armed Response was deployed from 18:00 to 06:00. This initiative has already led to them responding to several suspicious persons and vehicles, as well as some minor incidents and disturbances. Two arrests were made on different occasions as a result of the deployment. In the first incident, a suspect was arrested on 27 June 2020 after a burglary in Brandwag, and the second relates to a suspect who was arrested on 10 July 2020 after threatening students at Universitas.

These successes were the result of student and community participation in providing information, coupled with excellent response from private security companies, including Nissi Armed Response, VR Security, and BloemSec.

News Archive

More buy in to economics training in schools
2006-11-23

Departments of Education from five more provinces in South Africa bought in to the outreach programme of the National Council on Economic Education (NCEE) in the United States of America’s (USA) effort to improve the quality of the training in Economics of teachers and lecturers across the world. The University of the Free State's (UFS)  Department of Agricultural Economics is the initiator of this co-operative agreement with the NCEE.

 
Attending a workshop in Bloemfontein where heads of the various departments of education were present and received information on this project, were, from the left: Dr Radhika Bridgemohan (Department of Education: KwaZulu-Natal), Dr Patricia Elder (NCEE Vice-President in Washington DC), Dr Thula Mbatha (Chief Director in the Department of Education in KwaZulu-Natal), Dr Frank Peters (Director: Curriculums in the Department of Education in the Eastern Cape); back: Prof Klopper Oosthuizen (Department Agricultural Economics at the UFS and initiator and co-ordinator of the project).<

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