WITH THREE CAMPUSES, multiple research centres and world-class sports facilities, North-West University (NWU) is one of South Africa’s top providers of tertiary education. Renowned for its applied science, health and business degrees, it is the country’s only multilingual university, teaching in English, Afrikaans and Setswana, and offers an impressive choice of courses at 15 faculties and more than 50 schools. As a result, it now has more than 60,000 students—36,000 on campus


and 26,000 following distance-learning courses—making it South Africa’s second largest university. “Nationally, we are ranked among the top three universities for teaching and learning, the top six for research and the top four for sport,” says Vice-Chancellor Dr Theuns Eloff.


EMPLOYMENT PROSPECTS Many of the courses delivered on NWU’s three sites—Potchefstroom Campus and Mafikeng Campus in the North West Province, and Vaal Triangle Campus in Gauteng—focus on areas where South Africa has a skills shortage. This enables the university to not only contribute to the country’s economic growth, but also ensure that its graduates have better employment prospects than those of other institutions. It is, for example, the only South African university to offer a BSc in Animal


Health, graduates of which are in great demand in the rural farming economy. And in response to a critical skills deficit in logistics, NWU created its flagship Department of Transport, Economics and Logistics Management. It is also the only South African university to offer a master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering, while its School of Pharmacy is the biggest in the country, producing around 40 per cent of South Africa’s pharmacists. NWU also has numerous centres of research excellence in fields such as nutrition, pharmacy and space research. The impressive reputation of its nutrition research centre was confirmed recently when it won a 1.5 million


rand (£90,000) contract with UNICEF to help companies comply with international codes for marketing breast-milk substitutes. In a country famed for its sporting achievements, it is not surprising that


NWU rates sport highly, too. The university’s Potchefstroom Campus boasts a rugby institute and a hockey academy, Mafikeng Campus has a soccer institute, and several NWU sports teams—including the karate, athletics and women’s hockey teams—were the University Sports of South Africa champions in 2012. The university’s world-class facilities include the High Performance Institute


of Sport—one of the best-equipped gyms in Africa, which attracts elite athletes from around the world. NWU also has a four-star sports village, which hosted the Spanish football team when it won the 2010 FIFA World Cup. England’s rugby team and several British county cricket teams have also stayed there.


STUDENT DIVERSITY NWU also works hard to represent the diverse communities it serves. It has an independently chaired human rights committee, and actively reaches out to different language groups through its multilingual approach. “We’re recognised as one of the best-run universities in South Africa and have won a PricewaterhouseCoopers Award for excellence in governance for five years in a row,” says Dr Eloff. These accolades are also reward for NWU’s decentralised attitude to education, which includes having a rector and management team in situ on each campus. Looking to the future, NWU aims to raise its international profile still


further and maintain its high academic, research and sporting standards, while embracing the latest technology. “South Africa’s National Development Plan has set the target of increasing the country’s university population from 900,000 to 1.6 million by 2030,” says Dr Eloff. “In response, we are investing in online and interactive technology to run even more quality courses off-campus, while offering the best possible experience for all our students.”


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