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Fighting Food Insecurity at the University of the Free State

10 March 2022 | Story Anthony Mthembu | Photo Unsplash

Food security — The No Student Hungry team gearing up to start distributing food parcels to the selected students.

The UFS is one of the many institutions of higher learning where food insecurity is an active issue. However, the No Student Hungry Programme is one of the initiatives launched at the university to assist in fighting food insecurity at the institution.

The purpose of the programme

Since its inception in 2011, the initiative has assisted many students in acquiring a healthy meal. Additionally, the Food Environment Office also hands out food packages, so that students can continue to achieve academically. “We are trying to develop a healthy environment for students and make it easier for them to have a nice and healthy meal,” stated Annelize Visagie, who heads the Food Environment Office at the UFS. The Food Environment programme is spread out on all three campuses, each with its own facilitators. Furthermore, the programme mainly caters for students who are not funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) but who are excelling academically. The abovementioned students apply for assistance online, and a list is then drawn up of students who receive assistance for the year.

Alternative solutions to keep the initiative running

On the Bloemfontein Campus, the No Student Hungry Programme will be catering for 200 students in the 2022 academic year, assisting them with a daily nutritious meal. Additional food parcels are also handed out to provide further assistance. “We give food parcels to the students on the list every Tuesday and Thursday at the Thakaneng Bridge,” Visagie highlighted. However, she argues that catering for the student population through this programme can be a challenge, as the demand for assistance is growing rapidly and the ability to assist is limited. The programme relies on partnerships and sponsors to assist the student body. In fact, the coordinators of the programme currently have a memorandum of understanding with Tiger Brands according to which they deliver around 100 food parcels for distribution.

In addition, the coordinators have put in place alternative measures to ensure that they can provide more food to students. “The Kovsie Act Office, in partnership with the Department of Sustainable Food Systems and Development, has started a food garden where healthy and nutritious produce are grown, in order to add value to the distribution,” she indicated. Although the programme can only assist to a point, students who are in desperate need of assistance are never turned away. In fact, the Social Support Unit at Thakaneng Bridge usually assists students with food vouchers for a maximum of four days.

A commitment to teaching healthy eating habits

The programme is not only committed to curbing food insecurity, but also to ensuring that students have a healthy and balanced diet. As such, a booklet is being issued by the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics in collaboration with the Department of Sustainable Food Systems and Development, which contains ways in which students can make a healthy meal using some of the ingredients offered in the food parcels.

“We want to teach students how to eat healthy in the cheapest way, because they don’t have a lot of money to buy expensive food products,” Visagie argued.

News Archive

Student excels at international level with research in Inorganic Chemistry

2015-09-21

Carla Pretorius is currently conducting research in
Inorganic Chemistry at the St Petersburg University,
Russia.

Photo:Supplied

Carla Pretorius completed her PhD in Inorganic Chemistry recently, with a thesis entitled “Structural and Reactivity Study of Rhodium(I) Carbonyl Complexes as Model Nano Assemblies”, and has just received her results. The assessors were very impressed, and she will graduate at the next UFS Summer Graduation in December 2015.

She is currently conducting research in St Petersburg, Russia, by invitation. She is working in the group of Prof Vadim Kukushkin of the St Petersburg University, under a bilateral collaboration agreement between the groups of Prof Kukuskin (SPBU) and Prof André Roodt (Head of the Department of Chemistry at the UFS).

Her research involves the intermetallic rhodium-rhodium interactions for the formation of nano-wires and -plates, with applications in the micro-electronics industry, and potentially for harvesting sun energy. She was one of only three young South African scientists invited to attend the workshop “Hot Topics in Contemporary Crystallography” in Split in Croatia during 2014. More recently, she received the prize for best student poster presentation at the international symposium, Indaba 8 in Skukuza in the Kruger National Park, which was judged by an international panel.

Carla was also one of the few international PhD students invited to present a lecture at the 29th European Crystallographic Meeting (ECM29) in Rovinj, Croatia (23-28 August 2015; more than 1 000 delegates from 51 countries). As a result of this lecture, she has just received an invitation to start a collaborative project with a Polish research group at the European Synchrotron Research Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.

According to Prof Roodt, the ESRF ID09B beam line is the only one of its kind in Europe designed for time-resolved Laue diffraction experiments. It has a time-resolution of up to one tenth of a nanosecond, after activation by a laser pulse 100 times shorter (one tenth of a nanosecond when compared to one second is the equivalent of one second compared to 300 years). The results from these experiments will broaden the knowledge on light-induced transformations of very short processes; for example, as in photochemical reactions associated with sun energy harvesting, and will assist in the development of better materials to capture these.

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