About Us

Agenda 2063, the African continent’s primal masterplan for reimagining Africa into the global powerhouse of the future, identifies and gives priority to a set of specific imperatives and aspirations for inclusive and sustainable development, self-determination, and collective prosperity. Central to this, every African country, and by inference, every African university is responsible for the development of human and social capital through an education and skills revolution with emphasis on postgraduate preparedness that focuses of developing students whose research maximally utilises African epistemologies and whose outcomes provide African empirical solutions to African and Global problems.

Driven by this, universities play a central role in the attainment of this aspiration for an African skills revolution, whose success depends on postgraduate students receiving specialised research competence/ skills capacitation across the continuum of their research journeys, from study conceptualisation through to dissemination and application of their research outputs. The project is presented as programme of interventions (covering six domains of student research capacitation), in which the university’s Honours, Masters and Doctoral (i.e. postgraduate) students will receive transformative research capacitation that maximally utilises Euro-Northern centric and Afro-Southern centric methodologies in the training of students across the continuum of the research process.  Beyond the development of a reflexive, epistemologically well-rounded student, the project recognises the need to support students with overlooked higher order research competencies such as “writing for publication” and “grant writing” and these skills areas will be developed with the aim of positioning African Higher education research, so that it acts as a catalyst for the repositioning of Africa as a dominant player in the global arena.

The unequivocal identification of postgraduate preparation as the panacea to many of Africa’s social and economic ills serves as the scientific rationale for the location of this project within the postgraduate research environment, so that education institutions are rightfully at the centre of resolving the continents and the globe’s most seminal challenges. This calls for an aggressive overhaul of postgraduate research support, so much so that learners must now be given access to wide-ranging epistemologies, as part of their core training, so that they can begin to develop contextualised solutions for the contexts in which the live. This background serves as the basis for the development of the proposed AFRICAN ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME.

Guided by the above, UNISA’s College of graduate studies is submitting a grant application for funding to initiate and deliver a university-wide African Academic Development Programme (AADP).  To achieve the project’s objectives, students will be supported via six separate but simultaneously delivered pathways, each lasting between 3 and 6-months for

1. Postgraduate student Readiness Training
2. Research Conceptualisation and Planning
3. Multi-Inter and Transdisciplinarity competence development.
4.  Empirical and Analytical competencies
5. Research Dissemination Competencies among students
6. Postgraduate Entrepreneurial training – “ creating and realizing the commercial potential of postgraduate research”

Each of the above-specified competency training modules will be offered across the board to Honours, Postgraduate Diploma, Masters and Doctoral students on a 100% online basis and will be open to all of UNISA’s postgraduate student population of approximately 47 0000 students.

To register for the course you will have to complete our online registration form. Please click on the icon below to be redirected to it.