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24 April 2025 | Story Martinette Brits | Photo Barend Nagel
Mainstream Final Project
Five postgraduate students from Ethiopia and Togo with Prof Corli Witthuhn, coordinator of the MAINSTREAM project, during their academic exchange visit to the University of the Free State. From the left: Prudence Bilabina, Ame Houngo, Prof Corli Witthuhn, Gemedo Shengu, Fanny Sibabi, and Debela Bedada.

The University of the Free State (UFS) has welcomed a cohort of international students as part of the Mobility 4 Agricultural International Networks Supporting Thematic Resilience and Enhancing Adaptation and Mitigation (MAINSTREAM) project, a significant European Union-funded initiative aimed at boosting agricultural education and research across the African continent.

A group of postgraduate students from Togo and Ethiopia have recently joined the University of the Free State as part of the MAINSTREAM project. “Two doctoral students from Togo – Ame Houngo and Fanny Sibabi – are based in the Department of Sustainable Food Systems and Development and will be supervised by Dr Alba du Toit and Prof Maryke Labuschagne,” says Prof Corli Witthuhn from the Department of Sustainable Food Systems and Development at the UFS, who serves as the coordinator of the MAINSTREAM project. Master’s student Prudence Bilabina, also from Togo, is hosted by the Department of Agricultural Economics under the supervision of Prof Henry Jordaan.

From Ethiopia, doctoral student Debela Bedada and master’s student Gemedo Shengu are both pursuing their research in the Department of Agricultural Economics, supervised by Prof Nicky Matthews and Dr Janus Henning respectively.

A Ugandan student will soon join them on 22 April for a three-month traineeship. “He is an undergraduate Agriculture student who will register for a service-learning module at the UFS and spend the three months working on a farm,” explains Prof Witthuhn. The student hails from the Mountains of the Moon University in Uganda.

By June 2025, the university anticipates the arrival of four more students from Uganda – three at master’s level and one traineeship participant – bringing the total number of MAINSTREAM students hosted by UFS this year to ten.

 

Building a climate-resilient future through agricultural education

The MAINSTREAM project aims to foster education and skills improvement in agricultural knowledge systems, with a strong focus on climate change resilience. According to Prof Witthuhn, the project “strives to influence the common agenda for addressing education and skills improvement … targeting transformations with the tertiary agricultural education community, policy, and industry actors”.

An important aspect of the initiative is its emphasis on inclusion, particularly regarding African women who remain underrepresented in higher education agricultural programmes. “Mobility schemes will also be used to break cross-African gendered perceptions of agriculture … and to further provide for a gender-sensitive learning environment and institutional culture,” Prof Witthuhn notes.

The UFS’ participation forms part of a larger network of partner institutions across Africa and Europe, including Arsi University (Ethiopia), the University of Kara (Togo), the Mountains of the Moon University (Uganda), Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST, Kenya), the University of Sine Saloum El Hadji Ibrahima Niasse (USSEIN, Senegal), and the Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Science (Germany).

 

Strengthening research, networks, and collaboration at the UFS

This four-year project, running from 2024 to 2027, will host two cohorts of students. “We are a partner in the project that will run over four years … one of the UFS master’s students, Rinus Behrens from the Department of Sustainable Food Systems and Development, is currently spending four months at JOOUST in Kenya as part of the programme,” adds Prof Witthuhn.

The presence of these students at the UFS marks a pivotal moment for both the institution and its international counterparts. “For the institution, it creates the opportunity for new networks, new research opportunities, internationalisation of our research endeavour, and increased research outputs,” she says.

During their stay, master’s and doctoral students will engage in academic research aligned with their fields of study, while traineeship students will gain hands-on agricultural experience on farms in the Bloemfontein area.

Bedada says the programme is already making a meaningful impact on his academic journey. “I am analysing the impact of agricultural mechanisation on food security and production. It is a big opportunity, because it gives me a chance to expand my knowledge and skills, and to develop my research work to international level.”

Similarly, Houngo says the experience so far has been enriching. “I have already learned a lot, and I hope to replicate the experience in my hometown,” he shares.

Behind the scenes, UFS staff and departments are instrumental in ensuring the programme’s success. “They provide host departments, academic leadership, and supervision to the six students,” says Prof Witthuhn, emphasising the collaborative effort required to support this international initiative.

News Archive

Position statement: Recent reporting in newspapers
2014-10-03

 

You may have read reports in two Afrikaans newspapers, regarding recent events at the University of the Free State (UFS). Sadly, those reports are inaccurate, one-sided, exaggerated and based not on facts, but on rumour, gossip and unusually personal attacks on members of the university management.

Anyone who spends 10 minutes on our Bloemfontein Campus would wonder what the so-called ‘crisis’ is about.

We are left with no choice other than to consider legal action, as well as the intervention of the South African Press Ombudsman, among other steps, to protect the good name of the institution and the reputation of its staff. No journalist has the right to launch personal and damaging attacks on a university and its personnel, whatever his or her motives, without being fair and factual. In this respect, the newspapers have a case to answer.

But here are the facts in relation to the reports:

  1. No staff member, whether junior or senior, is ever suspended without hard evidence in hand. Such actions are rare, and when done, are preceded by careful reviews of our Human Resource Policies, labour legislation and both internal and external legal advice. Then, and only then, is a suspension affected. A suspension, moreover, does not mean you are guilty and is a precautionary action to allow for the disciplinary investigation and process to be conducted, especially where there is a serious case to answer.
  2. At no stage was the Registrar instructed to leave the university; this is patently false and yet reported as fact. We specifically responded to the media that the Registrar does outstanding work for the university and that it is our intention for him to remain as our Registrar through the end of his contract in 2016.
  3. The Rector does not make decisions by himself. Senior persons, from the position of Dean, upwards, are appointed by statutory and other senior committees of the university and finally approved by Council. No rector can override the decision of a senior committee, and this has not happened at the UFS even in cases where the Rector serves as Chair of that committee. The impression of heavy-handed management at the top insults all our committee structures, including the Institutional Forum – the widest and most inclusive of stakeholder bodies at a university – which reports directly to Council on fairness and compliance of selection processes.
  4. In the case of senior appointments, Council makes the final decision. Council fully supports the actions taken on senior appointments, including a recent senior suspension. The fact that one Council member resigns just before the end of his term, whatever the real reason for this action, does not deter from the fact that the full Council in its last sitting approved the major staffing decisions brought before it. The image therefore that the two newspapers try to create of great turmoil and distress at the university, is completely unfounded.

Even if we wanted to, the university obviously cannot provide details about staffing decisions, especially disciplinary actions in process, since the rights of individuals should be protected in terms of the Human Resource Policies and procedures of the UFS. But that does not give any newspaper the right to speculate or state as fact that which is based on rumour or gossip, or to slander senior personnel of the university. For these reasons, we have been forced to seek legal remedy and correction as a matter of urgency.

Make no mistake, underlying much of the criticism of the university has been a distress about transformation at the UFS; in particular, the perception is created that white colleagues are losing their jobs. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Our progress with equity has been slow and we lag far behind most of the former white universities; that is a fact. More than 90% of our professors are white; most of our senior appointments at professorial level and as heads of department are still overwhelmingly white. Reasonable South Africans would agree that our transformation still has a long way to go and only the mean-spirited would contend otherwise. But based on the two Afrikaans newspaper reports, an impression is left of the aggressive rooting out of white colleagues.

In the past few years the academic standard of the university has significantly improved. We now have the highest academic pass rates in years, in part because we raised the academic standards for admission four years ago. We now have the highest rate of research publications, and among the highest national publication rate of scholarly books, in the history of the UFS. We have one of the most stable financial situations of any university in South Africa, with a strong balance sheet and growing financial reserves way beyond what we had before. We now attract top professors from around the country and other parts of the world, and we have the highest number of rated researchers, through the National Research Foundation, than ever before. And after the constant turmoil of a number of years ago, we now have one of the most stable campuses in South Africa. Those are the facts.

The UFS is also regarded around the world as a university that has become a model of transformation and reconciliation in the student body. The elections of our Student Representative Council are only the most visible example of how far we have come in our leadership diversity. Not a week goes by in which other universities, nationally and abroad, do not come to Kovsies to consult with us on how they can learn from us and deepen their own transformations, especially among students.

Rather than focus on what more than one senior journalist, in reference to the article in Rapport of 21 September 2014, rightly called ‘a hatchet job’ on persons and the university, here are the objective findings of a recent survey of UFS stakeholders: 92% endorse our values; 77% agree with our transformation; 78% believe we are inclusive; and 78% applaud our overall reputation index.  Those are very different numbers from a few years ago when the institution was in crisis.

This is our commitment to all our stakeholders: we will continue our model of inclusive transformation which provides opportunities for study and for employment for all South Africans, including international students and colleagues. We remain committed to our parallel-medium instruction in which Afrikaans remains a language of instruction; we are in fact the only medical school in the country that offers dual education and training in both Afrikaans and English for our students - not only English. We provide bursaries and overseas study opportunities to all our students, irrespective of race. And our ‘future professors’ programme is richly diverse as we seek the academic stars of the future.

We are not perfect as a university management or community. Where we make mistakes, we acknowledge them and try to do better the next time round. But we remain steadfast in our goal of making the UFS a top world university in its academic ambitions and its human commitments.

END

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