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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab for Africa (J-PAL
Africa), with its Head Laboratory at MIT, and it works with
African governments, NGOs and businesses to generate
evidence needed for effective policies that improve the
lives of poor people. SALDRU has provided the recruitment
and project context for multiple doctoral and research
master’s students.
Outside the SoE, four Commerce research units already
existed before 2010: the Centre for Actuarial Research
(CARe), which focuses on technical demography and on
modelling thedemographicandepidemiological dynamics
of HIV/AIDS; the Centre for Information Technology
and National Development in Africa (CITANDA), which
studies the management, development, use and impact
of information and communication technology in areas
related to business, economic and social development in
Africa, with a special focus on new mobile communication
technologies and applications customised to the needs
of African enterprise; the Institute for Monitoring and
Evaluation (IME), which promotes capacity-building in
programme evaluation in Africa; and the University of
Cape Town Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing
(UISM), which has built a national reputation as South
Africa’s foremost source of intelligence on South African
consumer behaviour.
Since 2010, a strategic plan to extend existing research
platforms into “wall-to-wall” research units across the
faculty has been adopted. No academic is required to
join a unit but, if coverage of units is sufficiently deep, all
academics can find a natural home in at least one.
The first two new units to be accredited by the University
Research Committee (URC) were the Research Unit in
Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics (RUBEN),
which uses experiments to study ways in which people
and households in developing and least-developed
economies assess risk and make decisions, and the
unit for Policy Research in International Services and
Manufacturing (PRISM), which seeks to improve South
Africa’s competitiveness through undertaking evidence-
based research on firm and sector-level competitiveness,
as well as contributing to policy frameworks that impact
on African industrialisation paths. Both RUBEN and
PRISM have collaboration agreements with strong
international partner institutions, which the faculty
views as a preferred feature of all research units. RUBEN
is currently in negotiation with the Risk Management
Institute at Georgia State University to design a joint
doctoral programme.
This was followed by the African Collaboration for
Quantitative Finance and Risk Research (ACQuFRR), which
will be part of a larger, forthcoming structure – the research
wing of the planned African Institute for Financial Markets
and Risk Management (AIFMRM), funded by a coalition of
banks and insurance firms.
The UCT Tourism Research Unit (TRU) studies South Africa’s
tourism industry with the aim of identifying unrealised
opportunities and formulating innovative and sustainable
methods of filling these gaps.
Two units operating within the faculty, not yet URC-
accredited, are the Development Unit for New Enterprise
(DUNE),which focusesonbuildingentrepreneurial capability
in South Africa by researching the dynamics of leadership
and innovation in the fields of general entrepreneurship,
technopreneurship and social entrepreneurship; and the
unit for Practice and Research on Occupational Health
Psychology in Africa (PROHPA), which is dedicated to
applied research on issues relating to the well-being, safety
and health of people at work, through focus on the work
environment, the individual, and the work–family interface.
Most of these new units are in their founding stage of
development and considerable growth is expected in their
range and quantity of output in the years ahead. Crucially,
all are tasked with diversifying their sources of research
funding to enable more growth and scope in the faculty
as a whole.
The optimistic expectation is that the recent acceleration
of research in the faculty will continue through coming
decades with dynamic outcomes, not only for the academic
community, but for South Africa at large.