South Africa

Research collaboration

UiO and its South African partners have many common research interests within areas ranging from astrophysics, geology, climate change and medicine to education, cultural variations in languages, history and religion.

UiO cooperates with all the prestigious universities as well as a number of disadvantaged institutions in South Africa. UiO has considerable researcher-to-researcher cooperation with its South African partners. South African and UiO partners collaborate within Norwegian funding programmes and with international funding.

Project Examples

• The GLOBUS project (2016-20) was funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme, coordinated by UiO's ARENA Center for European studies, and University of Witswatersrand was one of the partners. GLOBUS explored underlying political and structural obstacles to justice. Analyses of the Euopean Union¡¯s positions and policies were combined with in-depth studies of non-European perspectives on the practices of the EU.
• Gobal Trout (2019-23) is a project financed by the Research Council of Norway with South African partners including University of Western Cape. This interdisciplinary project investigates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to new modes of conservation and environmental management that are responsive to the complex histories and politics of species introduction. More generally they ask how to study "global" environmental problems that unfold in highly diverse ways in different places. 
• Research environments already involved in research collaboration may also benefit from funding for integrating research and educational cooperation within the INTPART programme. The project Nuclear shapes and resonances in education (2017-19) strengthened the research and education collaboration of UiO with the University of California Berkeley, USA and the University of Stellenbosch and iThemba Labs in South Africa, within nuclear and energy physics. 

Collaboration in education and student exchange

UiO has various forms of educational cooperation with South African universities:

• Each summer, UiO's Centre for Entrepreneurship sends 30 students to the University of Cape Town to learn about social entrepreneurship. 
• The Faculty of Medicine at UiO and the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University have a long history of cooperation including student exchange. 
• The Faculty of Dentistry has extensive experience in cooperating with colleagues at the University of Western Cape (UWC). Joint projects that include staff and student exchange have been awarded funding from UTFORSK and Erasmus International Credit Mobility programme. Each spring, UiO dentistry students aquire clinical training at the University of Western Cape (UWC).
• Since 2015, the Faculty of Law at UiO and the North-West University in South Africa cooperate on a joint European Doctorate in Law and Development (EDOLAD) together with a number of European partner universities.