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29 March 2021
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1. Its support of and confidence in the leadership of the Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, Prof Francis Petersen and his team, and duly recognises the efforts and results achieved at the University during the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the current nationwide student protest on the payment of student debt.
2. In this context, the Council also distances itself and deplores the statements made by the leadership of the
Institutional Student Representative Council (ISRC), on national television on Monday 15 March 2021, as it pertained to the demand for the immediate resignation of the Rector and Vice-Chancellor, and the statements pertaining to the Chancellor, Prof Bonang Mohale, and Chairperson of the Council, Dr Willem Louw. The Council notes that Mr Katleho Lechoo, President of the ISRC subsequently retracted the utterances.
3. The Council strongly affirms its confidence in the relationship between the leadership of the UFS and the ISRC and expresses its appreciation for the University leadership’s commitment to continuously engage with students about matters of concern to them. The Council furthermore encourages positive and constructive engagement by the ISRC with the University leadership, as this contributes to shared-understanding of the challenges faced by the South African higher education sector and the governance of the UFS.
CDS receives another international grant from the NIH
2015-12-11
 Dr Carla Sharp |
The Centre for Development Support (CDS) is partner to another international research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States. The new project follows an earlier project funded by the NIH, which focused on the mental health of orphans and vulnerable children.
The new project is to focus on investigating possible improvements in the mental health and cognitive development of orphaned and vulnerable children aged between seven and eleven years, by means of improved community-based care in the Mangaung Township area in Bloemfontein. The project will stretch over three years and has a budget of approximately R10 million.
“We shall use the Mediational Intervention of Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC) approach and it will be applied by community-based organisations,” says Dr Deidre van Rooyen, Acting Director of the CDS.
MISC applied by caregivers has produced good results elsewhere in the world. “This is the first time MISC will be tested by community-based organisations,” says Prof Lochner Marais of the CDS, who is also the principal investigator in South Africa.
“In addition to working with four community-based organisations in Mangaung, Childline Free State will also be actively involved in the project,” Marais added.
The project is being conducted in collaboration with Dr Carla Sharp as principal investigator at the University of Houston, and Prof Michael Boivin (an international expert on MISC) at the Michigan State University. Dr Sharp was recently appointed visiting professor at the CDS.
“It is indeed a great privilege to be working with the CDS on yet another project,” Dr Sharp remarked, also noting that “the project is preliminary in nature and could evolve into a much bigger research project in future”.