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04 April 2024
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Story Lunga Luthuli
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Photo SUPPLIED
Dr Juliet Kamwendo champions gender-inclusive climate action in Africa. Her expertise at the recently held AFR100 workshop highlighted vital steps towards sustainable and equitable development.
Dr Juliet Kamwendo, Lecturer and Programme Director for Gender Studies in the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State, is spearheading efforts to integrate gender considerations into Africa's climate restoration agenda. Reflecting on her involvement, Dr Kamwendo stated, "This is particularly crucial, as women make up almost 50% of the population in Africa, and the depletion and degradation of land affect them disproportionately."
She recently served as a gender expert at the AUDA-NEPAD AFR100 workshop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, from 25 to 29 March 2024. This initiative aims to restore forests and degraded land across Africa by 2030, with a focus on gender equality.
The workshop emphasised the integration of gender perspectives into the AFR100 project, acknowledging the disproportionate impact of land degradation on women. Dr Kamwendo's expertise highlighted the need to empower women in climate change interventions, addressing existing gender inequalities exacerbated by environmental degradation.
“Women – who are primarily responsible for household food security and water provision – bear the brunt of environmental degradation, leading to increased workloads, reduced income opportunities, and heightened vulnerability to climate-related disasters. Furthermore, the loss of forest cover and biodiversity further exacerbates the challenges faced by women, particularly in rural areas where they depend heavily on natural resources for their livelihoods,” added Dr Kamwendo.
Her participation highlights academia's crucial role in fostering inclusive and sustainable development, emphasising interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle complex environmental challenges. Through initiatives such as AFR100, stakeholders are working towards a more resilient and gender-responsive future for Africa.
Famous mineralogists visit UFS Geology
2017-04-25
From the left: Prof Marian Tredoux, Associate
Professor at the UFS Department of Geology;
Prof Giorgio Garuti; from the University of Leoben,
Dr Federica Zaccarini, also from the
University of Leoben and Dr Freddie Roelofse,
Head of the Department of Geology at the UFS.
Photo: Rulanzen Martin
Years of academic friendship and collaboration is what makes Prof Giorgio Garuti and Dr Federica Zaccarini return to the University of the Free State (UFS) every so often.
The world-renowned academic duo from the University of Leoben in Austria were guest lecturers at the UFS Department of Geology. “We are here because we have known Professor Marian Tredoux and the Geology Department, for a long time. We are really happy to be here, and to be given the opportunity to present talks,” said Dr Zaccarini. The two are experts in platinum-group element mineralogy and each has given their surname to minerals namely, the Garutiite and Zaccariniite minerals.
Visit great advantage for research
They are acclaimed experts on very small minerals (smaller than a hundredth of a millimetre) with emphasis on platinum group elements in chrome-rich rocks. “Their visit is a great advantage for us. We also conduct research on these minerals and can learn from them,” said Prof Marian Tredoux, affiliated researcher at the Department of Geology.
Dr Zaccarini gave a lecture on Chromitites, and associated platinum-group elements, in ophiolites on Wednesday 5 April 2017 and Dr Garuti presented a lecture on Uralian-Alaskan complexes: a puzzling source of platinum, on Thursday 6 April 2017. During the talks they examined the association of the platinum-group minerals with chromite, rather than sulphide, and how this association can lead to the formation of unusual platinum-group element ores.
Collaboration on various academic papers
They and Prof Tredoux have collaborated on various research articles over the past four years, which have been published in various important international scientific journals. “These journals play an important role in calculating the H-scale which measures how important a researcher’s work is on an international scale,” said Prof Tredoux.