The South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) began in 2006 with 21 chairs and over ten years it has grown to 198 chairs. It's now a R404 million a year programme.
But it's not only supported by public funds. The SARCHi leverages private funding. For every R1 of public funding in SARCHi another R2 is invested by industry. The total cumulative public investment between 2006 and 2014 amounted to R1.5 billion and SARCHi holders - when there were 154 of them - were able to leverage an additional R3 billion from foreign sources, government departments, and private and industry funders. That was a huge vote of public confidence in our public research and development programme.
The SARChI focuses on established scientists, undertaking frontier research. At the same time it strengthens the human capital development pipeline by training the next generation of researchers. Each research chair supervises, on average, three times the number of honours, master's and doctoral students supervised by other established researchers holding research grants. This is partly because each research chair has more than five times the number of postdoctoral fellows of other established researchers.
SARCHi is a huge opportunity for our country and our continent. It nurtures research talent. This is vital for our future prosperity. It encourages the best scientists to work in South Africa. It encourages the best to stay at home.
The best scientists have a global choice of where to work. It's long been like this, a movement out of Africa to Europe and America, and universities have begun as one way of mitigating the effects of or to benefit from global competition by offering joint appointments.
It's one of the best ways to avoid a brain drain to developed countries. So we decided to expand SARCHi following the same principle. SARCHi has started a country bilateral programme, first with Switzerland in global environmental health last year, now with the UK in food security and political science, and in the future with Germany in nano science and advanced materials.
International cooperation has consistently been an important aspect of our various national research and innovation programmes and strategies.
Our relationship with the U.K. is deeply rooted in a colonial and subsequently commonwealth relationship. It was quite natural for our scientists to begin their studies in our universities and to finish them off in a British university. In fact, four of our science Nobel prize winners - Max Theiler, Alan Cormack, Aaron Klug and Sydney Brenner - followed this path. The Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge was the great meeting point.
Much has begun to change since the advent of democracy in South Africa to break up this pattern of dependence. South Africa now has a formal bilateral Science and Technology Agreement (since 1995) with the U.K. and a number of partnerships at country and university levels between our academics and researchers. South Africa is the fifth most successful country in accessing EU Framework Programme (FP7) research funding, partnering with scientists in the UK more than any other country.
The main bilateral science and innovation programme is the UK/South Africa Newton Fund, which was launched in September 2014. The partnership is worth up to R300 million over five years.
Activities focus on public health, environment and food security, and science and technology capacity building, underpinned by cross-cutting themes of Big Data and regional co-operation across sub-Saharan Africa.
During the third, and most recent task force meeting in Pretoria, the DST and the South African Departments of Higher Education and Training, Basic Education, and Health agreed to share departmental priority areas to be explored for potential future bilateral collaboration under the Newton Fund. Other Departments are keen to participate in the Newton partnership which will enter the partnership with their own resources
Today we launch the first three bilateral UK-SA chairs. I would like to congratulate Dr Stephen Devereux, Research Chair in Food Security, at UWC; Prof Michael John Roberts, Research Chair Food Security, at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University; and Prof Lawrence Hamilton, Research Chair in Political Theory, at University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
I anticipate that they will contribute to South Africa's growing importance as a centre of science and innovation excellence, best illustrated by the 2012 decision for SA to co-host the Square Kilometre Array giant telescope - one of the largest ever international science projects - and one of the most important partnerships between the UK and South Africa.
