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UFS wins top awards at the 2024 Mace Excellence Awards

05 December 2024 | Story Dr Cindé Greyling | Photo Kaleidoscope

MACE Winners 2024 — From left to right: Burneline Kaars (Head: Employee Wellness and Organisational Development), Dr WP Wahl (Student Life Director), Linda Greyling (Senior Officer: Special Projects, Student Recruitment Services), Gerben Van Niekerk (Senior Officer: Kovsie Support Services), Malia Maranyane (Senior Officer: Undergraduate Marketing, Student Recruitment Services), Nomonde Mbadi (Student Recruitment Services Director), and Susan Van Jaarsveld (Senior Director: Human Resources).

On 28 November 2024, the University of the Free State (UFS) did it again – reigned as champions at the annual Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Excellence Awards and walking away with two of the top awards: the MACE Award for Outstanding Research and the Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence.

KovsieX was named the overall winner of the MACE Award for Outstanding Research. This award is made to the entry with the highest score in research, clearly demonstrating how research has supported the strategic objectives of the institution and the project. KovsieX is a multiplatform approach designed to leverage the strengths of diverse media channels. This digitalisation aligns with Vision 130, leveraging emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning quality and efficiency of non-academic support structures and systems.

The UFS’ entries were of such high quality that the university won the sought-after Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence. This award is based on the number of entries entered by an institution and the number and level of those entries winning awards. The award is therefore made to the institution with the highest success ratio.

Furthermore, the UFS Matriculant of the Year event received a Silver Award – entries scoring 5.75 or higher earn a Silver Award, placing this event among some of the top achievers in the events category. Three UFS entries received Gold Awards and were the winners in their respective categories: KovsieChat (Digital Channels), 2024 Women’s Day Breakfast (Events), and KovsieX (Stakeholder Engagement Campaigns). This is a magnificent achievement for the UFS.

"Winning a MACE award at this early stage is proof that KovsieX is not just meeting national standards – it’s setting them. If we can achieve this level of excellence now, imagine how we’ll compete on the global stage when the project is fully realised,” says Gerben van Niekerk, Student Media Manager.

Lacea Loader, Senior Director: Communication and Marketing and Coordinator of the MACE Excellence Awards, explained that a record number of entries were received for the Excellence Awards this year. “We are ecstatic about the direction of communication at the UFS and that the university has been able to maintain the quality of its entries in recent years,” says Loader.

The MACE Excellence Awards takes place annually as part of the MACE National Conference, recognising and celebrating excellence and the achievements of specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement, and communication in the higher-education sector. This year, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) hosted the conference from 27 to 28 November 2024.

In 2023, the UFS won 11 awards, including the Chairperson’s Award of Excellence.

News Archive

Stanford University hosts book launch for UFS Prestige Scholar

2015-12-14

Dr Christian Williams, a member of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme, had his book launched by Stanford University. The book called National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps will be available in South Africa early in 2016.
Photo: Sonia Small

A launch for the much-anticipated book by Dr Christian Williams from the University of the Free State (UFS) was sponsored by the Humanities Center and the Center for African Studies of Stanford University in the USA, among others.

The launch of the book, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps, coincided with the 40th anniversary of Angola’s independence.

The book was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2015, and the launch at Stanford was on 16 November 2015.

This groundbreaking study, which will be available in South Africa early next year, has already been lauded for its invaluable contribution and the depth of its scholarship. The author is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology of the UFS, and member of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme (PSP). He is a former Fulbright scholar, and holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan in History and Anthropology.

National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa follows members of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) through three decades of exile in Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola.

It highlights how different Namibians experienced exile, as well as the tensions that developed within SWAPO as Namibians encountered one another while officials asserted their power and protected their interests.

It also follows the return of Namibians who lived in exile to post-colonial Namibia, examining the extent to which divisions and hierarchies that emerged in the camps still continue to shape Namibians today.

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