The SA universities’ SDGs study provokes animated response from conference delegates

Published On: 11 November 2024|

The release of the South African Universities – Mapping the Sustainable Development Goals report generated a multitude of responses at USAf’s 3rd Higher Education Conference in Pretoria in October.

When Professor Corli Witthuhn, the lead researcher from the University of the Free State, presented the findings, delegates plied her with questions.

This is an edited account of the Q&A session that followed her presentation at the at the CSIR International Conference Centre.

QUESTION 1: Ms Janet van Rhyn (right), Project Manager: Sector Support at USAf: I am part of the USAf steering committee of the study and so have huge appreciation for it. My question relates to the slide you presented on collaboration and partnerships. You mentioned the University of Johannesburg (UJ), University of Cape Town (UCT) and Rhodes University (RU) had the most collaborations. Yet they were also cited as making the greatest contribution to the SDG outputs. Could you comment on that? It seems where there are more collaborations, there is also a significant impact in terms of contributions to outputs.

A: Professor Witthuhn: I think if there is international collaboration, there is often higher impact. I haven’t done the statistics, but this is my gut feeling. I don’t know if there are UJ colleagues here this afternoon, but UJ is just rocking the SDGs, so obviously there is very good leadership at UJ to address all the SDGs. Their international collaboration is 51%, so definitely on the higher end, and my sense is that it certainly contributes to quality outputs.

QUESTION 2: Dr Mandy Hlengwa (left), Senior Lecturer in Education and Coordinator of the New Generation of Academics Programme at RU: I’m also interested in your slide with the pie charts with the four institutions you chose to discuss collaboration. The measure of impact is still heavily weighted towards how much of your collaborators are international versus African or institutions across the country.

I also have a question about impact. A paper and a publication have a particular metric of how we measure impact. But the kind of impact we are looking for in SDGs needs to be experienced beyond our publications and our book reports. There’s a chance to think about that in the next part of the study – to look at impact in a different, additional way.

A: Professor Witthuhn: In terms of internationalisation, specifically Africa, we didn’t separate collaboration into different countries. So within international collaboration, there is a lot of collaboration on the continent.

You also asked about how we impact the community. The only way we could assess that in this first round was to look if our research is used in policy documents. That was our measure. But I hear you about community engagement. I think that’s important.

QUESTION 3: Dr Phethiwe Matutu (right), Chief Executive Officer of USAf: Thank you very much, colleagues, for the study. It looks like a lot was done in a very short period of time.

The intention of the mapping was to identify collaboration opportunities for universities. Not so much looking back at who was collaborating with who, but if you are working in water, or you’re working in poverty, then there are opportunities for you to collaborate. I must discuss this issue with China in the next few days. Would it be an appropriate assumption to say: ‘Look at our universities, which are very strong when it comes to this or the other’?

And am I right in thinking that the aspect of who informs the research agenda – looking at the issues of poverty and quality education – is an indication of the incentives we provide to the system for doing research? Certainly, the more you publish with international collaborators, the more you get cited. So, in that case, you may be discouraged to address local issues pertinent to our environment in South Africa. Could the incentives we’re putting forward not be working against us? International authors have no interest in poverty because they’re not experiencing it. So how best do we find ways of creating capacity internally to determine our own research agenda?

Next, I wish to discuss the issue of recognition in terms of the Times Higher Education rankings.  We had the Minister’s Advisor yesterday, citing those institutions listed there, and institutions such as Rhodes that refuse to be assessed because they want to focus on their own business and priorities. When you mention that Rhodes University is high up in your study when it comes to some of the SDGs, no one will believe you, because they won’t appear on the Times Higher Education rankings. I would like to hear your assessment of mapping versus the rankings.

A: Professor Witthuhn (left): You’re right. I think this study creates an opportunity for us to say, ‘here are the leading universities in a specific SDG’; that would be where the expertise in that SDG lies, and those would be the ones you can put forward for collaboration, internationally. I would definitely support that.

I think the question of incentives is a difficult one to answer but I can say everybody in the room knows that funding drives behaviour. So if it’s strategically important for the country to address SDG 1 on No Poverty, we need to put some funding behind it, and then researchers will come up with research questions and approaches.

You also mentioned the 10 universities that applied for the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. I think the report will encourage quite a lot of universities to apply. It is clear we make a significant contribution to the SDGs, and maybe it is a positive reinforcement for more universities to achieve the Times Higher Education ranking. I’m hoping the report will help universities to be confident about applying.

QUESTION 4:  Dr Ruby-Ann Levendal (right), Director of Transformation at Nelson Mandela University: The three pillars for higher education institutions are teaching and learning, research and engagement. I was wondering if the proxy for engagements was collaborations. How was that element, which is key in terms of direct involvement in societal challenges, evaluated? I am interested to hear how all the elements of our purpose as a university were actually evaluated.

A: Professor Witthuhn: We didn’t do specific things on teaching and learning. We did look at the annual reports and research reports, and we’re hoping that we’ve picked up that in the annual reports. The same with engagement. If that was reported in the annual reports, we were able to quantify it.

QUESTION 5: Ms Bibi Bouwman (left), Director of Sustainability and Community Impact at North-West University: We are also very interested in tracking our impact at North-West University, specifically in terms of societal impact. My understanding from the presentation is that this was based on research metrics that you could engage in and replies from the universities. Did you include, or do you think it’s important, to include the voices of the communities that are receiving the services from universities?

A: Professor Witthuhn: No, we didn’t do it. We had five months to do the research, but I think it’s really important to assess the community experience in terms of our involvement in SDGs. So I really like that question.

QUESTION 6: Mr Berto Bosscha (right), Education and Science Counsellor at the Netherlands Embassy in Pretoria: I hope we can make connections with institutions so we can work together. SDG 14, about living below sea level, is something we do generally in the Netherlands. So that would be a very interesting topic to start with. How can we coordinate this exchange to find partners? Is that something you could do, or do we look to USAf for that?

The second question is: speaking about communities and the impact of external communities, what about the students within the institutions? Are they part of this research, its dissemination and discussions on the outcomes? How are they involved?

A: Professor Witthuhn: On the question about life below water and how we coordinate that, I think it would be fantastic to speak to colleagues, either at UCT or Rhodes or Nelson Mandela University. Janet van Rhyn of USAf could probably help connect them with you.

In terms of student involvement, the short answer is no. The only way we involved students is that they did a lot of the research and wrote some of the articles – postgraduate students. We didn’t involve students specifically.

QUESTION 7: Dr Bongiwe Hobololo (left), Senior Manager: Institutional Audits at the Council on Higher Education (CHE): When you referred to Centres of Excellence, which ones were those? I am thinking about SDG 4, which deals with quality education, because I am from the CHE. Did you review our reports? Some are annual publications, and they address many issues of quality in higher education. If we’re looking at the total research output, those should be counted. So there might be an omission here.

A: Professor Witthuhn: No, we didn’t include CHE reports. We included annual reports and research reports of the 26 public universities. The CHE wasn’t part of the scope. But I think we need to think about it and look at what is in the CHE reports.

QUESTION 8: Dr Thelma Louw (right), Director: Sustainability, Monitoring and Evaluation, Department: Quality Assurance and Enhancement at the University of South Africa: I need to add another level to the undertaking, and that is universities as micro communities. We have research but do universities apply that research in their own environment?  In other words, to what extent do universities have water purification at their residences, or look at their own waste systems? If you factor that in and look at the much-discussed poverty alleviation aspect, and then look at the extent to which universities perhaps have feeding schemes for our students, I think that will change the whole picture completely.

A: Professor Witthuhn: That makes perfect sense to me. There are a lot of really interesting environmental green activities on campuses, which should also be reported as part of our impact. So thank you for that.

COMMENT: Professor Jesika Singh (left), Director: Research Development and Postgraduate Support at the University of the Western Cape, who chaired this conference session sub-themed ‘The University as an Impactful Societal Resource’, in which the SDGs mapping study was presented, concluded the discussion by saying the study was a baseline report. “I think our colleagues at USAf have enough fuel, especially from the comments and recommendation, to go and look for more funding so that we can take this project on the SDGs to a new level.” Professor Singh is also a member of USAf’s Research and Innovation Strategy Group that commissioned this study as part of its Research Cooperation and Collaboration priority focus for 2023/4.

Gillian Anstey is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.