by Rudi Buys UFS Dean of Student Affairs

Hungry students who do not know where the next meal will come from often fail their studies and so as a country we fail the hopes of local communities for a brighter future.

Our National Development Plan references the challenge. Our universities partner with community organisations and businesses to alleviate the plight. Our students design their own campus solutions to the this growing need among their peers.

But, as higher education in South Africa we’ve not as yet developed national communities of practice and reflection specifically for student hunger and food insecurity. While all institutions and student bodies respond to this challenge in various and unique ways, discussions for and agreement on shared and benchmarked approaches in this regard seem absent.

For these reasons the UFS No Student Hungry programme calls for a Higher Education Colloquium on student hunger and food insecurity to be hosted at the UFS, 10th to 12th October 2014.

You can sponsor a student or make a donation.

You can sponsor a student or make a donation.

Involving various public and private partners, the Colloquium Hope Beyond Hunger aims to bring together South African higher education institutions to:
• Share current practices
• Explore best practices and
• Consider available research on student food insecurity.

Guided by our shared reflections as a sector and with partners we hope to establish more formally a national community of practice and reflection, galvanise partnerships for new solutions and explore potential research agendas to make sense of and solve student hunger and food insecurity.

A formal call for contributions to and participation in the Colloquium will be announced shortly. All interested partners are invited to contact Rudi Buys, Dean of Student Affairs, at buysbr@ufs.ac.za