As was widely anticipated, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) by a unanimous vote decided at a third consecutive meeting (and its last meeting of the year) to again keep interest rates unchanged, with the repo rate staying at 8,25%.
Post-apartheid South Africa continues to have many unresolved problems and unfulfilled promises, despite significant progress in certain areas. A recently published book on the work of the late anti-apartheid activist and intellectual, Mzala Nxumalo, aims to make important contributions to the intellectual work that lies ahead for South Africa in current troubling times – particularly in the context of contemporary leftist politics.
On Saturday, 7 October, southern parts of Israel suffered a surprise attack on an unprecedented scale by Palestinian military group Hamas, leaving a wake of destruction, with more than 700 dead, thousands of injuries and a host of civilians taken hostage.
Israel’s response has been swift, with targeted air strikes in Gaza and talk of a ground incursion into the disputed region abounding.
South Africa and the North-West University (NWU) are stepping up to develop the African continent’s capabilities to develop its own human vaccines.
The glaring disparities in vaccine access during the Covid-19 pandemic has led to South Africa taking significant strides to bridge the gap between the global north and the African continent's vaccine development needs.
As winter ended and spring entered with sunny pleasantness, thousands of “attackers” sprang into action to plague the part of the population that suffers from allergies and hay fever.
Prof Stuart Piketh from the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management in the School of Geo and Spatial Sciences at the North-West University (NWU) was recently honoured with the prestigious National Association for Clean Air (NACA) Golden Award during the annual NACA conference.
Safety, proactive cooperation between various role players, accessibility and, again, safety.
Zürich 2024, here we come, complete with a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg and wheelchair.
Headed by the formidable North-West University (NWU) team of Prof André Grobler and Ian Thomson from the Faculty of Engineering and Dr Mark Kramer from Health Sciences, the innovators are preparing to take the fruits of their research and designs in digital health to the international stage.
They will be competing at the 2024 Cybathlon competition* in Switzerland. This competition, in the form of a gruelling race, will take place in Kloten near Zürich in October next year.
The faculties at the North-West University (NWU) are doing exciting work on the research front.
Prof Moses Retselisitsoe Phooko is the director of Professional Development and Community Engagement in the Faculty of Law. His research is on the Southern African Development Community (SADC). He explains more about what his research entails.
The continent is ravaged by a host of factors inhibiting food security and is trapped in what a recent report by the World Bank calls “the perfect storm”. Its consequences are disastrous. The Covid-19 pandemic was followed by the war in the Ukraine, which has led to severe food and fertiliser shortages. Now, Africa is in the midst of a tempest of increased debt and inflation, as well as the effects of climate change. The World Bank states that at least one in five Africans goes to bed hungry, and that about 140 million people in Africa are in a food insecurity stranglehold.