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17 June 2020
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Story Dr WP Wahl
The Division of Student Affairs (DSA) prioritises innovation to meet the challenges of food insecurity and malnutrition among students. To this end, several student volunteers and student governance structures are collaborating with the DSA on various initiatives.
During 2019, various conversations were held about the possibility of creating a health-promoting food environment at the UFS where students and staff are well informed and empowered to take appropriate action regarding their food and nutritional needs. These conversations resulted in an institutional strategy to address the food environment at the UFS. Student representatives serve on a technical committee that directs the implementation of this strategy. In this regard, several initiatives have already been launched.
Students from residences and other student communities have planted vegetable gardens on the Bloemfontein Campus with the assistance of KovsieACT and the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. Students and staff are already harvesting and distributing vegetables to needy students every week. Measurements were put in place to continue this during the COVID-19 period. The following vegetables were planted: spinach, cabbage, beetroot, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.
Food parcels, donated by Tiger Brands and Gift of the Givers, are continuously handed out by DSA staff and student volunteers. In this regard, 540 food parcels have already been handed out on the Bloemfontein Campus during the COVID-19 period alone. During the same time, 117 students received food parcels on the Qwaqwa Campus. The innovation of this food parcel project rests on the fact that business, NPOs, UFS students, and DSA staff are collaborating to address food insecurity and malnutrition.
More collaborative initiatives will be implemented over the next 12 months. The DSA staff and students are already working with the Department of Dietetics and Consumer Sciences to create information packages about the preparation of low-budget nutritious meals.
Related article:
Vegetable tunnels established to continue the fight against food insecurity
Expert in Africa Studies debunks African middle class myth
2016-05-10
From left: Prof Heidi Hudson, Director of the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS), Joe Besigye from the Institute of Reconciliation and Social Justice, and Prof Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor at the CAS and guest lecturer for the day.
Photo: Valentino Ndaba
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Until recently, think tanks from North America, the African Development Bank, United Nations Development Plan, and global economists have defined the African middle class based purely on monetary arithmetic. One of the claims made in the past is that anyone with a consumption power of $2 per day constitutes the middle class. Following this, if poverty is defined as monetary income below $1.5 a day, it means that it takes just half a dollar to reach the threshold considered as African middle class.
Prof Henning Melber highlighted the disparities in the notion of a growing African middle class in a guest lecture titled A critical anatomy of the African middle class(es), hosted by our Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) at the University of the Free State on 4 May 2016. He is an Extraordinary Professor at the Centre, as well as Senior Adviser and Director Emeritus of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Sweden.
Prof Melber argued that it is misleading to consider only income when identifying the middle class. In his opinion, such views were advanced by promoters of the global neo-liberal project. “My suspicion is that those who promote the middle class discourse in that way, based on such a low threshold, were desperate to look for the success story that testifies to Africa rising.”
Another pitfall of such a middle-class analysis is its ahistorical contextualisation. This economically-reduced notion of the class is a sheer distortion. Prof Melber advised analysts to take cognisance of factors, such as consumption patterns, lifestyle, and political affiliation, amongst others.
In his second lecture for the day, Prof Melber dealt withthe topic of: Namibia since independence: the limits to Liberation, painting the historical backdrop against which the country’s current government is consolidating its political hegemony. He highlighted examples of the limited transformation that has been achieved since Namibia’s independence in 1990.