EN - Educational (Strategic Plan) - Flipbook - Page 8
A WINDOW
INTO SOME KEY DRIVERS OF
UCT’S RESEARCH AGENDA
AND VISION IN 2020/21
The 2020/21 research year at UCT was
influenced, as was the case elsewhere, by
the impact of COVID-19, and particular to
UCT, the unfurling of UCT’s Vision 2030.
While we rallied and pivoted to respond to
varying lockdown levels, ongoing uncertainty
in business models and the urgency of our
pandemic-focused research initiatives, we
simultaneously set our sights on UCT’s role
in “unleashing human potential for a fair and
just society” and enhancing our research
agenda towards “unleashing knowledge in,
for and from Africa to redefine and co-create
a sustainable global future”.
Despite the pandemic – and, in
fact, driven by the increased
urgency created by
COVID-19 – the last
year at UCT has seen
several seminal events
informed by and
feeding into our
forward thinking.
The SDGs Africa summit –
towards the Africa we want
Delayed from April 2020 by the pandemic,
the online International Summit on
the SDGs in Africa, hosted by UCT in
September 2021, focused on the need to
accelerate an Africa-centric approach to
moving towards sustainable development
in Africa and achieving Agenda 2063 and
the associated SDGs.
We brought together a wide variety of
thinkers and doers from the continent
and the rest of the world. Together they
helped us create a strong focus on Africa,
to launch an action-oriented collaboration
that will extend beyond the summit and
drive our research agenda.
We built this through the seeding of ideas
for innovative actions by eminent thinkers
drawn from global scholars, activists,
business and government; and building
context through cross-cutting panel
discussion, we prepared the ground for the
ongoing work of our seven thematic tracks
to refine position papers and action plans.
Our take-home messages included the
imperative for integrated, cross-cutting
solutions developed collaboratively; the
centre-staging of justice; recognising
the need to work across multiple time
horizons; celebrating and accommodating
diverse perspectives, to exclude none;
and importantly, the need to meet African
challenges with solutions that are sensitive
to the context of Africa, and led by Africans in
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