Page 22 - DUT Annual Report 2020

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DURBAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY ANNUAL REPORT 2020
principles that ensure allocations to the salary bill year after year do not threaten financial sustainability, like they did up to 2016 when the salary bill edged on 75% of operating income.
I am pleased that DUT received yet another unqualified audit opinion for the year under review. However, there remain many control and accounting challenges as a result of a largely manual financial system and other unconscionable practices which the DUT system entailed for many years. We have begun to work on all of these areas. Despite these challenges, most of our financial ratios point to a very healthy and sustainable financial position.
Green Ecosystems
In so many ways, this is a relatively new area of strategic focus for DUT, at least in its organisation. We have completed the Green Building Audit of all our buildings in order to ascertain and confirm requirements. We are taking these in phases and incorporating retrofitting in our maintenance projects. The biggest roll-out will be the S-Block renovations we started towards the end of 2020. The Solar Panel Project at the Steve Biko Library rooftop is now complete and will be expanded to Indumiso Campus, Ritson Campus and S-Block at Steve Biko Campus, while the Water Harvesting Project from the boreholes is currently under way and should be completed in 2021.
SOCIETY
Arguably, of the four Perspectives, Society is the most aspirational, and will thus manifest in the fullness of the life of ENVISION2030 and beyond. While the others may represent the archer’s arrows, this Perspective embodies the archer’s aim. By achieving the nine SOs that underpin the other three Perspectives and realising the remaining three that constitute the Perspective of Society, it is hoped that we will have demonstrably manifested our commitment to impact the lives and livelihoods of our people, both internal and external, locally, nationally and globally. In so doing, the collective impact of our accomplishments will reverberate across the various components of society.
A closer reading of the preceding paragraph suggests that this Perspective encapsulates our raison d’e être as a societal institution. It is the second of our ‘influencing and impacting’ Perspectives. It focuses on DUT being on course to make its unique and impactful contribution towards ‘improving the lives and livelihoods’ of the broader society. In this respect, there are three SOs, namely an Engaged University, Innovative and Entrepreneurial, and Adaptive Graduates.
Engaged University
Our framework for engagement with the broader society is predicated on local, regional, national and global imperatives. Documents such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),Africa’s Agenda 2063, South Africa’s National Development Plan, regional, and local growth and development plans contain such imperatives. Given that we are first and foremost a university, it is the teaching-learning and research-innovation programmes and initiatives that will be the basis of our engagements with all our quad-helix organs of our broader society as we work towards the achievement of these imperatives together.
In our quest to contribute towards transforming societies and economies, as referred to earlier under the sub-section on Innovative Curricula and Research, we have established at least 60 partnerships that embed our work in our localities and in our region. In the area of research innovation, for example, we have realigned and also introduced a number of research-innovation focus areas that respond to SDGs and other imperatives in the rest of this document.
Even though DUT’s academic focus in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities is less pronounced, we nevertheless make waves in those fields. Our Urban Futures Centre was awarded the inaugural team award of the 2020/21 HSRC-USAf Medal in Social Sciences and Humanities. This award shows the phenomenal work related to COVID-19 that the team has been engaged in with the homeless and drug addicts. The Gender Justice, Health and Human Development Focus has been successfully awarded the Gender Responsive Resilience and Intersectionality in Practice (GRRIP) Award as part of a network of universities in the United Kingdom led by the University College London.
Transforming economies requires people who are well trained and geared to innovate and be entrepreneurial. To this end, in 2020 we offered entrepreneurship training to 1500 students as well as 1908 community members in partnership with the Small Enterprise Development Agency (SEDA). At least 90 student small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) out of 1500 were supported as part of our DUT Entrepreneurship Programme, with 12 trademarks to be registered soon. These interventions have contributed to the creation of 170 full-time jobs and 25 part-time jobs, which surpassed the SEDA reporting targets.
With substantial support from our innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, our Enactus team (a student organisation amongst many successful ones), has