International collaboration

The Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences is continuously seeking international partners and it is evident from the significant number of formal collaborative initiatives, appointments of extraordinary and honorary professors from abroad, international collaborators appearing as joint authors on quality internationally accredited publications and the number of international postdoctoral students that the Faculty has embedded in its mission a focus to compete and collaborate with some of the best in the world.

This is substantiated by the number of international grants our researchers receive from various funding agencies such as the Gates foundation, Rockefeller, EU funding, WK Kellogg foundation, African Economic Research Consortium AERC, the World Bank and various other funding agencies. These involvements and activities support the strategic objective of UP to be a major role-player on the international front and in addition to this to have an impact locally and on the African continent.

The Faculty has numerous active formal and informal agreements with institutions all over the world. Locally the Faculty through the Southern Education and Research Alliance work closely with the CSIR on very successful research projects relating to aspects of Water, Food Science and Nutrition, Malaria, Gene Technologies, Rural development issues and others. We have collaborative relationships with many of the big industries supported partially by the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme which include SAPPI, Mondi, PBMR and Sasol and others. The Faculty is also extremely successful through National Research Foundation supported programmes of which the prestigious NRF/UK Royal Society grant is one example. In addition to this we participate on many projects funded by the WRC, Agricultural Research Council, Department of Science and Technology (DST) and others. The DST funding for the Centre of Excellence at the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute at UP is a good example.

The Faculty also receives large international funding from European Union projects, the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and others. Other important alliances from the Faculty exist with CIRAD, IFPRI, IDRC, etc. With regard to postgraduate training the Faculty has a large percentage of students from all over the African continent. One example is the Department of Agricultural Economics pivotal role in a collaborative master’s degree for students in Eastern and Southern Africa.