On 7th February the two members of the “German Federal Parliament”, Ulla Schmidt und Dagmar Freitag, who stayed in South Africa for taking part in the 2019 State of the Nation Address by the South African President Cyral Ramaphosa, used the opportunity to as well visit two DAAD funded Centres of Excellence in Cape Town together with the Consul General Matthias Hansen.They first visited the African Institute for Mathematical Studies (AIMS) in Muizenberg and afterwards the South African-German Centre for Development Research (SA-GER CDR).
Prof. Jullian May, the director of the SA-GER CDR at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), stressed the supra-regional importance of the Centre, the high number of Alumni who successfully work in development research or development co-operation and the strong motivation of these Alumni to build networks like the African Excellence Network of all DAAD African Excellence Centres, “Tumefika” (which means “We have arrived”) which was constituted in 2018.
During the occasion, current Phd scholarship holders of the SA-GER CDR presented on their research related to poverty reduction and public administration, current Master scholarship holders presented the different Master Programmes of the Centre and Ulla Schmidt, Dagmar Freitag and Matthias Hansen as well met DAAD-Alumna Prof. Pamela Dube, the current DVC for Student Development and Support at UWC, Winnie Sambu as the representative of “Tumefika” and several other DAAD scholarship holders studying at UWC.
Prof. Wilhelm Löwenstein, managing director of the IEE of Ruhr University Bochum, took part in the event by making use of the DAAD funded videoconference system ZOOM and presented his vision of a German-African Graduate School as one option to foster the sustainability of the DAAD African Excellence Centres.