South Africa is a very important partner country to VLIR-UOS. Cooperation of Flemish and South African higher education goes back to the mid-1990s. From 2003 to 2023 VLIR-UOS spent over € 23.8 million in cooperation with South Africa, including 2 long-term Institutional University Cooperation (IUC) programmes with the University of Western Cape (UWC) and the University of Limpopo (UL). The 11 ongoing TEAM/SI/ITP projects are at the center of the South-Africa country programme.

South Africa is also one of our 29 scholarship countries.

Ongoing projects

Institutional University Cooperation

IUC 2020 Phase out UL

TEAM projects

A Nation Divided? Assessing and Analyzing Social Cohesion in South Africa Health care without communication? The language gap Bridging the gap: an intervention to capitalize on the intermediate role of the household in community support for HIV care Training the Teachers of the Future: Language Policy and Literacy at CPUT Strengthen the academic eco-system for social entrepreneurship as a catalyst to job creation and social and economic change Remote Sensing for Urban and Rural Development & Resilience (ReSiDeR)

JOINT

Sustaining, deepening and expanding the Sub-Saharan HPV research network WAKA-HPV Africa Improved infectious diseases research and surveillance in Ethiopia through capacity building in bioinformatics and sequencing Statistics for development Supporting Community Health Workers through Interprofessional Learning Towards a more gender sensitive and inclusive academic culture in Ethiopia An international academic Family Medicine Network on interprofessional collaboration The Internet of Drops: Linking small water related observations towards a cloud of data with IoT enabled sensor networks

South Initiatives

SERIAL: Socio- Ecological Resilience in Agricultural Landscapes Improving Student Entrepreneurship Support at South African Universities in order to Mitigate Youth Unemployment Strengthening beginning teachers’ professional identity WaRe-SimPLE: Conv of waste treatment to resource recovery facilities in Limpopo through open source simulation-based engg tools Improving industrial policy intervention in South Africa Solar food drying combined with a thermal energy storage (TES) system to increase drying capacity Improving teachers’ cognition of academic language learning in STEM education (STEM-CALP) Economic Empowerment through Cultural Inclusion in Stellenbosch (EECI)

VLADOC PhD Scholarships

Claiming land and history. A meta-historical analysis of Khoisan land claims and indigenous rights activism in South Africa. Implementation of Isoniazid Preventive Therapy for children and HIV-positive adults: a prospective cohort study at primary care

South Africa and Agenda 2030 - country reference framework

VLIR-UOS revised its country approach towards an ‘Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development’ centred approach. Moreover, VLIR-UOS wants to facilitate connections between different actors and projects present in a given country. With these objectives in mind, the Country Reference Framework (CRF) for South Africa supports teams of academics when identifying and formulating project proposals, by providing a context analysis focused on Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development and the higher education sector in South Africa, and by providing an overview of Belgian development actors active in South Africa, their ongoing projects and partners, in view of exploration of opportunities for synergy and complementarity. Belgian Non-Governmental Actors involved in the geographic Joint Strategic Framework (JSF) South Africa as well as those involved in the thematic JSF on Higher Education and Science for Sustainable Development have been included.