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09 March 2021 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Charl Devenish
Dr Alice Ncube, Lecturer and Programme Manager in the UFS Centre for Disaster Management Training and Education Centre (DiMTEC), believes that women should be part of the decision-making processes, starting at home right down to the legislative platforms.
Rising inequalities worldwide – now exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic – saw the need to re-emphasise the demand for strong, independent civil-society-driven efforts. “This can ensure rights‐based and gender‐responsive national and regional policies focusing on gender equality and women empowerment,” says Dr Alice Ncube, Lecturer and Programme Manager in the UFS Centre for Disaster Management Training and Education Centre (DiMTEC).

The United Nations Gender Action Plan emphasises the need to empower women on clean energy and climate-change adaptation policies. Though women are ‘the other’, they understand the multiple economic, social, and environmental benefits of being at the forefront of sustainable development as primary home-keepers. Unlocking women’s true potential in education, politics, leadership, commerce, and industry will ensure progress. 

A prosperous future for any country requires a peaceful environment for all, especially women and girls, to freely strive to pursue their projects, businesses, and education without fear of gender and sexual violence. 

Women should be part of the decision-making processes, starting at home right down to the legislative platforms. Women need to decide how to participate and how to bridge the gap created by many years of exclusion in areas of life. Their voices should be heard and not only be used to grace occasions for others to make decisions for them. In a genuinely inclusive world, I believe in encompassing a better world for today and the future – an autonomous, peaceful, inclusive, and equitable world.

News Archive

Transformation in higher education discussed at colloquium
2013-05-16

16 May 2013

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The University of the Free State hosted the Higher Education Transformation Colloquium earlier this month on the Bloemfontein Campus.

On Monday 6 May 2013 till Wednesday 8 May 2013 the event brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including some members of university councils; vice-chancellors; academics and researchers; leaders of student formations and presidents of student representative councils; transformation managers; executive directors with responsibility for transformation in various universities, members of the newly established Transformation Oversight Committee and senior representatives from the Department of Higher Education and Training.

The event examined and debated some of the latest research studies and practices on the topic, as well as selected case studies from a number of public universities in South Africa.

Delivering a presentation at the colloquium, Dr Lis Lange, Senior Director of the Directorate for Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the UFS, said transformation in South Africa has been oversimplified and reduced to numbers, and the factors that might accelerate or slow the process have not been taken into account.

Dr Lange was delivering a paper, titled: The knowledge(s) of transformation: an archaeological perspective.

Dr Lange argued that “in the process of translating evolving political arguments into policy making, the intellectual, political and moral elements that shaped the conceptualisation of transformation in the early 1990s in South Africa, were reduced and oversimplified.”

She said crucial aspects of this reduction were the elimination of paradox and contradiction in the concept; the establishment of one accepted register of what transformation was and it is becoming sector-specific or socially blind. This means that the process was narrowed down in the policy texts and in the corresponding implementation strategies to the transformation of higher education, the schools system, the judiciary and the media, without keeping an eye on the structural conditions that can influence it in one way or another.

Dr Lange said the need for accountability further helped with reduction of transformation. “Because government and social institutions are accountable for their promises, transformation had to be measured and demonstrated.”

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