It is one of the most significant acts of aggression that one country has perpetrated against another in the 21st century. The Russian invasion of Ukraine may have consequences that are almost unfathomable and that will echo through the annals of history.

Thanks to the launch of the Digital Storytelling Hub of the North-West University (NWU), social innovators now have a brand-new platform where they can share solutions to their communities’ challenges.

Funding received from the European Union programme Erasmus+ (https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/opportunities-under-erasmus)  made the launch of the hub possible, says Bibi Bouwman, NWU's director of Sustainability and Impact.

Kirsty Kyle, a master’s student at the North-West University (NWU), has recently published an educational children’s book and, after receiving sponsorship for the printing, donated the books to under-privileged schools.

The North-West University Business School held their first face-to-face Think Tank in front of a live audience in Somerset West where the Minister of Finance’s national budget speech was analysed and unpacked by a panel of experts.

This initiative forms part of a series of roadshows that the school has in the pipeline for 2022. More 150 people attended the event in person, and 160 people also attended online.

The panel of experts included the likes of:

The top three academic performers who matriculated in 2021 in North West will be studying at the North-West University in 2022.

“I cannot do it, that’s how I was raised, Oom,” she replied to this author’s plea to address him by his first name. It’s a definite refusal from the legendary 17-year-old sitting across from me on the North-West University’s campus in Potchefstroom, worlds away from the community of Great Brak River in the Western Cape, about 10 km northeast of Mossel Bay.

Academics in the subject group Business Statistics and Operations Research of the North-West University (NWU) recently donated school shoes to less privileged learners at PHERA Primary School in Tsetse, a village on the outskirts of Mahikeng.

The North-West University’s annual Modiragatsi innovation competition that gives high-school learners between the ages of 15 and 18 the opportunity to become the next generation of problem solvers is back and it is even bigger and better this year.

The competition’s main focus is still on empowering high-school girls, but from this year it also allows for boys to enter as long as they are part of a team of two of whom one of the participants identify as female.

You can tell him nothing about challenges. After all, he is swimmer who has represented his province, North West, at national level. Hours of sweating in the gym? No problem. In fact, it is all that sweating in the water and with weights that built those shoulders on which his next challenge, and his next responsibility, rests.