On Women’s Day this year, the Business School of the North-West University (NWU) had the privilege of honouring gifted young learners and students with great minds and the potential to shape a better future for all! The Modiragatsi Youth Innovation Competition finalists and winners were celebrated during a breakfast event at The Capital On The Park Hotel in Sandton.

It is time to buck the dusky trend. The national energy provider, Eskom, is haemorrhaging money at an unsustainable rate and is nearly R400 billion in debt. Equipment is failing, power outages have become the norm, while its energy availability factor (EAF) has fallen by almost 30% in just over a decade.

North-West University (NWU) students and twins Andrea and Marco Fiorita, recently received their degrees in computer and electronic engineering with distinction.

“Growing up, we were inseparable and always in cahoots. We made smoke bombs, took apart electronics around the house, build crazy contraptions and watched endless YouTube videos on how to make cool gadgets at home,” says Marko.

All these activities created an interest and stirred a love for creating and learning, and it came as no surprise when they decided to enroll for a degree in engineering.

It was love at first sight. Boy meets campus. In 2019, Franco van Dijk visited the North-West University (NWU) campus in Potchefstroom as part of a tour by his school choir.

“We saw a lot of the campus – it almost felt like an open day. I really liked what I saw and decided that this was where I wanted to go,” says Franco, who matriculated from the Ligbron Academy of Technology.  

Franco, who was born in Bethal, Mpumalanga, will be turning 19 in May and is enrolled in his first year of working towards a degree in Electromechanical Engineering.

Jacques Beukes of the MUST Deep Learning research group at the Faculty of Engineering is the 2021 winner of a North-West University (NWU) Vice-Chancellor’s Medal for his dissertation “Interpretability of deep neural networks for SYM-H prediction”. Eight vice-chancellor’s medals are awarded annually to the best master’s-degree students at the NWU. Jacques was awarded the medal for Engineering.

The word “digital” has a strong presence in virtually every sector these days, along with outcries for re-skilling and up-skilling of the workforce with digital literacy and skills for them to remain relevant for the future world of work. The Covid-19 pandemic has seemingly increased the pace and urgency of acquiring these skills. Internationally, digital literacy and skills are deemed essential by research and advisory firms like Gartner to enable lifelong learning and more effective workforce management, and ensure the competitiveness of employers and employees alike.

The Earth is in trouble. It is suffocating under clouds of carbon dioxide emissions from the use of coal and other environmentally damaging resources to generate energy. These emissions are the primary cause of global warming, and if humanity wants to avoid the worst consequences of global warming*, we have to find alternatives for our energy needs.

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.

Waiting for medical treatment can be a life-or-death matter.

“Waiting times in healthcare are a significant problem that occurs across the world and often has catastrophic effects – as we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Maria van Zyl, a lecturer in the School of Industrial Engineering at the North-West University (NWU).

Meelan Roopa, a lecturer in the North-West University’s (NWU’s) School of Industrial Engineering, is currently conducting research on new ideas and strategic ways of achieving environmental sustainability for developing countries through industrial engineering.

His research explores the synergies, divergencies and needs of ensuring environmental sustainability using the theory, methods, techniques and strategies formulated within industrial engineering.