The idea that movement is medicine dates back to the Ancient Greeks in Olympia but warrants resuscitation in the 21st Century.
When the Ancient Greeks delivered the first Olympic Games in Olympia in 776 BCE, they showcased athletes in peak physical condition. The fact that these exclusively male athletes competed in the nude is further evidence of the Ancient Greeks’ celebration of the physical human form.
Although chariot-racing and the pankration – the ultimate fighting sport to the death – no longer feature in the modern Olympics, the Games have endured in pursuit of Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).
In the 21st Century, while few of us are Olympic athletes, sport and exercise as medicine – and as a scientific and academic discipline – are now more than ever a critical component of a healthy and thriving lifestyle.
Demitri Constantinou, a Professor in the Department of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine at Wits says, “Many will immediately think that Sport and Exercise Medicine is a highly specific and specialised field of medicine looking after elite athletes, but it’s a lot more than that.”
At his inaugural lecture in September 2025, Constantinou, who himself is Greek, said, “We have to acknowledge the Ancient Greeks: Pythagoras was an athlete and the first to prescribe exercise for health. Plato considered physical activity as a sister art of medicine and popularised it. Aristoteles advised exercise for health and risk reduction and he linked cardiovascular physiology with health.”
Sports medicine heroics
Most people are familiar with the Hippocratic oath – the physicians’ pledge to practise medicine ethically. Constantinou says, “Hippocrates, a physician, is known as the father of medicine. He was the first practitioner of physical therapy.”
In the 5th Century BCE, Olympic athlete Iccus, who is considered the father of athletic nutrition, was one of the first to emphasise balancing diet and exercise, says Constantinou. Later, in 785-420 BCE, Herodotus used physical exercise and manipulations as tools for restoring health, while Crates took daily walks to improve diseases of his liver and spleen.
But it was Herodicus in the 5th Century BCE who first combined sports with medicine, pioneering sport and exercise medicine into what would become an academic and scientific discipline.
The field of Sport and Exercise Medicine (SEM) flourished. By the 19th Century, British physiologist Archibald Vivian Hill founded the disciplines of biophysics and operations research, sharing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1922 for research into the production of heat and mechanical work in muscles.
A century later, in 1928, on Valentine’s Day, arguably fittingly heart-related, physicians from 11 countries founded the Association Internationale Médico-Sportive (AIMS) today known as FIMS, the International Federation of Sports Medicine.
Here in South Africa, a Wits University graduate in 1940, Cyril Wyndham (1916-1987) set up the famous Human Sciences Laboratory of Chamber of Mines Research Organisation. “He worked on physiological problems faced by miners and became the leading international expert on human thermal physiology,” says Constantinou. “By 1975, he had published over 250 papers on applied physiology.”
By the turn of the century, the BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine Journal, which was established in 2015, highlighted the field of SEM in its call for papers. Five years later, in March 2020, the Health Professions Council of South Africa formally recognised SEM as a medical speciality in the country – and not a moment too soon ...
Pandemic of inactivity
According to the World Health Organization, inactivity (‘inexercise’) causes some five million deaths per year globally. “In South Africa, inactivity is even worse,” says Constantinou. “Even though we see a decline in communicable diseases, there’s an increase in non-communicable diseases and part of the problem is obesity. There has been a significant increase over the past three decades, particularly of black females – who are obese, not even overweight. And it starts early in life.”
Systemic inequality and the fact that obesity is “not seen as a public health priority, but should be” contribute to this “pandemic of inactivity”, along with a lack of awareness of what SEM is, says Constantinou, who chairs the FIMS Education Commission.
Stronger together
SEM has the potential to get South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs moving and thriving. In June, Constantinou was a signatory to the 2025 Hamburg Declaration on Sport, Health and Human Performance. The declaration unites a powerful coalition of sports medicine, public health, academic, athlete-representatives, and policymaking organisations in a shared commitment to safeguard health, promote inclusivity and support sustainable human performance across all actors of sport and physical activity.
“Sport and Exercise Medicine is a catalyst for social change,” says Constantinou, who advocates for harnessing the power of sport, for example, the Springboks, to bring people together and promote physical exercise. “We cannot allow only those people with resources to be active.”
We need not all be Olympians but we can aspire to move more as individuals, families and in our communities in pursuit of Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together. This was how the Olympic motto was updated in 2021 to denote that we can only become stronger by standing (and moving) together, in solidarity. 
Deborah Minors is Senior Communications Officer at Wits University and CURIOS.TY Co-Editor.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Barely surviving … or thriving
- Schalk Mouton
We are living life back to front. It’s time to draw up a new blueprint.
How long will this blizzard last, already? We’ve been stuck in this cupboard of a room for three days now! As South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs travelling in Europe, the shoestring only goes so far and all things being equal, you want to spend as much time as you can exploring, adventuring, experiencing. A darn inconvenience, I should say!
We just paid the equivalent of two months’ medical aid premiums to take the Northern Lights tour in Norway, which, due to winds blowing snow horizontally across the Earth at the speed of sound so you can’t see an inch in front of you, has been cancelled. Asking for a refund only elicits the same response you’d get to a query from your medical aid provider.
Like many South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs, when travelling to wealthier parts of the world, our routine is to find the cheapest Airbnb, shop for salads and a piece of protein in the local grocery store and walk just about everywhere with no thoughts of taxis.
However, when you’re stuck in a space the size of a closet for three days, that is where you get to know yourself and your partner, in ways that you never thought possible. You also start to think about things that you’ve never thought about before.
Like why, for instance, in Airbnbs, or hotels, is there never a towel rail in the bathroom? Or a soap dish in the shower? Why, for the love of dried fish, is there a beautiful, top-of-the-range oven but nothing resembling an oven tray or an ovenproof dish to be found, rendering the oven useless? In the bedroom, reading lights are either never in a convenient spot or they are so weak that you might as well be trying to read with your travel mask on.
It’s as if these places were designed by someone who never spent a day in an Airbnb. No thought has gone into the user experience. I often feel the same way about life. I strongly doubt – and feel free to disagree – that the blueprint for life was drawn up by someone who experienced it themselves! We have textbooks, white papers and podcasts by the boatloads, but are they actually useful?
Flip the script
I think that we live our lives back to front. We are born, go to school, university follows, we work ourselves – literally – to death, and then retire. When all our hormones are raging and we have the energy to climb mountains, we don’t have a cent to spare, so we must pin our butts to a chair and study.
On the other hand, in retirement, when we have all the time in the world, are a lot more interested in learning new things, and have money to spend, we have very little energy, or the body for it. How about swapping these around? Travel when you’re young! Study when you’re done!
Yes, I know. It’s not practical and it is a white loaf under the armpit problem. But if whoever designed life had lived before they drew up the blueprint, I’m positive that they could have made it work!
The daily grind
We live life chasing the unattainable. Our priorities are all wrong. We spend at least eight hours a day at work, sitting uncomfortably, staring at a screen or doing something that we don’t enjoy, spending time with people we don’t necessarily want to be with, while the rest of the waking day – four hours at most – we have to divide between everything else that matters – family, friends, exercise and hobbies.
I know we have to work to earn a living, but work, I believe, should not be our first priority.
Numerous studies – including from Wits – have shown that for humans to really thrive, what matters most is exercise and movement, social life, a healthy diet and a good night’s sleep. If you get that right, you are on the right track. But that’s not what the blueprint tells us.
You wake up grumpy in the morning because you can’t sleep worrying about problems at work. You rush to work, grabbing a garage pie and a Red Bull on the way. You eat, while sitting alone for two hours in traffic, the radio presenter the closest friend you have. You head into the office and you’re hit by another crisis that ties you up for the next 12 hours and keeps you awake again that night. No wonder we are so mentally and physically burnt out by October that we party hard over December, just to hit repeat in January.
Pause for thought
Nothing about our lives is designed to encourage us to live “right”. Instead of making it safe and convenient to get on a bicycle and ride the 4km to work, our roads and transport systems deter us from moving, so we get in the car, windows rolled up. We are distrustful of strangers, so we don’t connect with others. It’s easier – and cheaper – to pick up something ultra-processed for dinner than to cook a healthy meal and so we keep ourselves going with handfuls of multivitamins and prescription pills.
Instead of hitting repeat, I think it’s time to hit “pause”. Work should not be our first priority. It should be fighting for a place at number four, at the most. Our priority should be living a life in which we connect, move, and eat properly and take care of ourselves.
And yes, I know. First world problems. We need money to survive, and for that we need to work, and very few of us are lucky enough to love our jobs. If that’s you, then great. But work shouldn’t be at the expense of the things we should be spending time on.
Schalk Mouton is Senior Communications Officer at Wits University and CURIOS.TY Editor.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø protest reflects the struggle to thrive
- Felix Quibe
The right to protest is protected by South Africa’s Constitution, but growing use of interdicts by powerful actors undermines community's from thriving.
The right to protest, assemble and demonstrate is a cornerstone of our constitutional democracy. Protests serve as a powerful expression of dissatisfaction and in most instances are a measure of last resort after all other avenues for addressing an issue have been exhausted, offering marginalised communities a vital platform to voice their concerns. The right to protest enables anyone to voice their grievances and demand accountability when other forms of engagement prove ineffective.
Protests have catalysed numerous social movements worldwide, including #FeesMustFall, #RejectFinanceBill protests and #EndSARS – all of which emerged from the right to protest.
It stands to reason that if everything were okay, there would be no protests. The prevalence of protest indicates a substantial level of discontent amongst the population and signals a shortcoming on the part of the government to fulfill its constitutional obligation to ensure that citizens have appropriate living conditions.
Protest particulars
Thirty-one years into democracy, many South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø communities continue to live in poverty, lacking the necessities for a dignified life, such as adequate housing, electricity, water and sanitation. The government’s failure to address these needs has caused deep frustration, pushing people to protest as a way to be heard.
Student protests have also long been a feature of South Africa’s democratic landscape. These protests are a response to issues such as financial exclusion, high tuition fees, inadequate housing, institutional racism and substandard campus facilities. They reflect broader societal problems such as inequality and highlight the urgent need for systemic change to create a more accessible higher education system that ensures that all young people have a fair chance to succeed.
Communities in mining-affected areas often find themselves compelled to protest. For these communities, protests are crucial in their struggle for justice, equity and recognition. A visit to these communities highlights the glaring contrast between the wealth generated by mining corporations and the poverty endured by the residents who remain excluded from the economic benefits derived from the extraction of resources from their land.
Interdicts threaten rights
Interdicts are court orders designed to protect a legally recognised right or interest from unlawful interference. In constitutional democracies, interdicts play a crucial role in protecting individuals' rights against unlawful encroachments. However, these legal instruments are increasingly being misused to criminalise protests and demonstrations, sometimes utilised by those in power to silence communities seeking to hold them accountable.
What we are seeing is a trend where interdicts are being used not to prevent unlawful conduct but to deter legitimate protest and silence communities. This has a chilling effect on the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and protest, leaving communities and activists fearful of speaking out or demanding better services.
The increasing use of interdicts by powerful actors in response to rising protest activity signals a bleak future for communities, one where inequality deepens, community voices are silenced and the foundations of our democracy are gradually undermined. It also raises serious concerns about how powerful entities exploit the legal system to stifle protest and dissent. This tactic not only overlooks the underlying issues that drive communities to take to the streets but also undermines core democratic principles. For many, protest is often the only recourse available for addressing the political and social matters that directly impact their lives. By silencing these voices, communities are further disempowered and the cycle of poverty and inequality is perpetuated.
Lawful mobilisation
Communities are fighting for basic services, which are the essential foundation of a dignified life. They cannot truly be said to thrive when governments and corporations neglect to provide those fundamental services to which communities are entitled.
Instead of investing in legal battles to silence community voices, the entities against whom the protests are directed should be utilising their resources for the resolution of the issues. Protests should not be viewed as threats but rather as calls for attention to unresolved grievances.
Our courts have an important role to play and are encouraged to adopt a more nuanced and balanced approach, rather than viewing these matters solely through a corporate lens, as has too often been the case. By understanding the root causes of protests, courts can help create opportunities for meaningful engagement and sustainable, long-term solutions.
Felix Quibe is an attorney at the Wits Centre for Applied Legal Studies’ Right2Protest Project, where he is dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of protesters. His work is driven by a commitment to empowering individuals to understand and exercise their constitutional rights, while also serving as a custodian of our Constitution. Quibe believes that the law is a powerful tool for social change and should be utilised to safeguard the rights of marginalised and vulnerable members of our society.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Co-designing the smart µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø city
- Deryn Graham
Smart cities depend on more than technology to serve communities.
While President Ramaphosa might have grandiose ideas for building the first new city in democratic South Africa, the Lanseria Airport City Mega project, which he first mentioned in his 2020 State of the Nation Address, one Wits professor and a PhD student have a more modest, human-centric vision for improvements to one of Johannesburg’s existing suburbs.
Rennie Naidoo, Professor of Information Systems and Research Director at the Wits School of Business Sciences and PhD student Terence Fenn piloted the Participatory Futures Method of research in Westbury, a resource-scarce but culturally vibrant neighbourhood in the west of Johannesburg. Adapted from the US developed Design Science Research model which has been used primarily in blue chip companies to help them optimise profitability, the method, as its name suggests is more participatory, following the movement to make research less about rigour and more about relevance.
Hierarchy of needs
The objective of Fenn’s research was to find out from the members of the Westbury community itself at grassroots level, how they envision thriving through smart urban technologies. Naidoo was surprised by the creativity and deep thought that went into some of the community’s responses.
“Despite the serious socioeconomic challenges facing Westbury, arts and music is still very much part of the community’s mindset – the community members talked about establishing a cultural precinct, as well as recycling kiosks,” says Naidoo. “In their hierarchy of needs, I was surprised but I soon realised how much cultural enrichment and safety and security matter.”
Using technology including cellphones and the internet, Westbury residents want safety without surveillance overreach, creativity without exclusion and smart infrastructure that empowers rather than controls. Participants imagined tech enabled community centres, solar powered resilience hubs and streets designed for culture, not just cars.
Westbury’s vision does not exactly align with Ramaphosa’s – government may want South Africa to go head-to-head with America and China in developing heavy mega smart cities – but Fenn and Naidoo found that this community rejects top-down techno-utopias and instead sees a future rooted in collective memory, local agency and ubuntu.
Naidoo believes that national government is out of touch with the needs of communities and he believes that when local government leaders are absent, government fails to see what communities want.
“A representative democracy is one in which politicians are far more engaged with their constituents,” elaborates Naidoo.
Our own vision for smart cities includes sustainable urban planning, minimal environmental impact, resource efficient buildings and systems, parks, gardens and communal spaces for working, living and playing.
Technology has the capacity to widen inequalities, as well as to enhance urban lifestyles and it is in finding the best use of increasingly less expensive tech programmes, apps, systems and the internet that we can create smart communities and then scale up to create smart cities.
Cities as co-created spaces
Naidoo and Fenn’s research invites a rethinking of smart cities, not as systems we impose on people and communities but as futures we co-create. It has revealed that to thrive in the cities of the future, we must rewire not just our technology but our imaginations.
For Naidoo and Fenn, collaboration, co-creation and participation are all buzzwords as much as AI, the internet and smart technology, in our quest to create smart µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø cities that work financially, spatially, practically and in the context of each community.
“Given that projections put 60% of the µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø population in cities by 2050, it is important that we get our planning right,” says Naidoo. “We may not have the budget for grand sweeping projects such as Lanseria but the cumulative effect of small, transformative projects within communities can have a dramatic impact on our living conditions.”
Ultimately, it’s not cities that thrive but the people who inhabit them.
Deryn Graham is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Mapping the human story behind the science
- Leanne Rencken
PhD student Caitlin Wheeler digs deep beyond the data to connect with patients, students and mentors.
Caitlin Wheeler speaks with quiet assurance from a world in which science and humanity connect. Currently immersed in her research on autoimmune liver disease, she has been guided through her career by discovery, connection and communication.
Her way of thinking, she says, is rooted in her mother’s influence. “She is a town planner and has always thought very spatially about ideas and has passed that on to me. I am able to visualise the problem and orientate myself within it.” Her instinct to see patterns has shaped her approach to genetics and one day she hopes to apply it – in her transcriptomics work – to studying how gene expression unfolds at the cellular level.
“One of my biggest passions is science communication,” she says, speaking about finding stories within data and making research accessible. Her passion runs through her outreach work at the Wits Adler Museum of Medicine, where she helps secondary school students discover that science can be more than that to which they are typically exposed. “Many learners want to study medicine but haven’t really been exposed to this other side of the biological sciences,” she adds.
Rooted in science
As a child, Caitlin was curious and observant, always busy formulating backyard potions from leaves and lemons. Early experiments evolved into a fascination with living systems. She started out in animal science at Stellenbosch University but shifted to biochemistry and human genetics – the field in which she has come to thrive.
Her move to Wits for a Master’s in Genomic Medicine proved decisive. “It was my first exposure to how clinical and scientific research can work hand in hand,” she recalls, describing a world in which discovery prioritises patient care and highlights the importance of teamwork.
Now pursuing her PhD, Caitlin is investigating autoimmune hepatitis, a disease in which the immune system attacks the liver. The project links clinicians at the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre with scientific researchers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. The collaboration, she says, embodies her belief that science cannot thrive in isolation. “Traditionally science has worked in silos. I want to form a bridge between these different areas,” says Wheeler.
A diagnostic odyssey
This bridge is both scientific and personal. Caitlin meets with the patients whose biopsies supply the samples that she analyses and she does not take that privilege lightly. These patients have endured what many call “a diagnostic odyssey,” a journey of uncertainty before receiving clarity on their condition. These encounters keep her grounded and remind her of the human stakes behind the data.
Through her work, Caitlin is helping to fill what she describes as a major gap: “µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø data has been underrepresented on an international level just because studies haven’t been able to lift off and thrive.” With experts now challenging long-held perspectives, that imbalance is beginning to change. Her team’s findings could eventually improve diagnosis and treatment not only for South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs but across a continent where few liver-transplant centres exist.
She credits a network of mentors from different fields, many of them women in STEM, for helping her stay the course. It’s taught her that asking for guidance, despite what she calls “natural shyness” is not weakness, but courage. Today she pays that generosity forward, with a commitment to younger scientists, especially young girls who need visible role models.
Local grit
For Caitlin, communication is more than outreach: “Science is built on being able to communicate ideas and results because if you have a scientific discovery that is brilliant but you’re not able to communicate the importance of that to different spheres of the community – a clinical team or a patient advocacy group – then the results aren’t as impactful,” she explains.
At a Novartis Next Generation Scientist internship in Switzerland for three months in 2025, she was struck by the abundance of resources in the Global North and the opportunity to interact with the international scientific community. Yet, coming home gave her a new appreciation of South Africa’s warmth, ingenuity and resilience. “It was delightful to come back to the resourceful and innovative attitude we have here. There, they have a different outlook. In South Africa, the main focus is on building a good foundation from which to explore further.”
Research can be unpredictable and at times intimidating, especially when experiments and code fail. She draws resilience from her mentors, her family and a simple question that she carries into every collaboration: How can I help? This perfectly captures her instinct to create working spaces in which everyone thrives.
She also knows that not all young scientists have access to this kind of support. Many face short-term contracts, limited resources and few formal mentorship opportunities. “The best environments are those that see science as a collective effort,” she explains, “If I could change one thing, it would be the support that we give young researchers not only through mentorship but also through funding.”
Her guiding principles are simple and enduring: curiosity, persistence and kindness – profound constants that keep her growing while helping others do the same.
To arrange school tours with the Wits Adler Museum of Medicine, please contact the coordinator Lydia.Makua@wits.ac.za.
Leanne Rencken is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
‘Seeing’ the air that you breathe
- Shaun Smillie
A new AI-driven air quality monitoring system gives people the power to understand the risks to their health posed by air pollution.
Johannesburg’s air quality has never really been measured systematically. Like many other cities across the globe, scientists have battled to develop cost-effective monitoring systems that provide accurate real time data on air pollution.
This is all about to change, thanks to some home-grown tech and the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The study’s pilot saw sensors placed along the M1 highway, close to the University, followed by the next phase of the roll-out and the deployment of over 500 air quality monitoring devices in strategic locations across Gauteng.
AI reducing costs
Traditionally, air quality monitoring has been hampered by the need to use very specialised teams of experts to interpret the data. “This makes it extremely expensive and not even the global north can afford it. So we use AI to do the job of interpreting data,” says project leader, Professor Bruce Mellado from the Wits Institute for Collider Particle Physics. “AI allows us to interpret the data, to make forecasts automatically in real time and to make models based on data – that is where most of the costs lie. We are creating a lot of data and unique data sets that fit into what will become the most sophisticated air quality model based on artificial intelligence, probably in the world.”
Mellado’s own experience as a particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the training of his students at the international facility, have provided his team with invaluable expertise in working with big data, which is put into use with the air quality monitoring system. He used a similar approach to set up Gauteng’s Covid-19 Dashboard, which allowed health officials to forecast new outbreaks during the pandemic.
The AI_r system has attracted international attention and Mellado and his team won the 2025 ODESS Prize in France, beating 350 entries from around the world. The award was made in recognition of the design and deployment of the AI-powered environmental monitoring system.
How to ‘see’ air
In each of the system’s sensors, a laser is used to quantify the concentration of particles found in the air. The data is uploaded through Wi-Fi and the Internet. The system is modular, so the sensors can be upgraded to monitor different chemicals and pollutants within the environment.
AI_r is already providing a snapshot of the air that Joburgers breathe in on a daily basis.
One of the issues that has already been picked up is that Johannesburg has a problem with illegal dump fires, including one that happens regularly in Kya Sands to the north west of Johannesburg. According to Dr Mpho Mathebula from the Wits Department of Psychology who has been studying the effect that these fires have on residents, there have been reports of people experiencing dizziness and battling to breathe, with some even hospitalised.
While work continues to determine what pollutants are released in these fires, the AI_r network of sensors has been able to pick up and track how smoke from the Kya Sands dump fire spreads across the City, covering areas where hundreds of thousands of residents live.
Air pollution kills millions of people every year. The World Health Organization estimates that about seven million people die prematurely from illnesses attributed to household air pollution caused by fuels and kerosene used in cooking.
“We are not trying to gather new evidence to prove how poor air quality impacts on the health of populations. That is already known. What we are trying to do is to find tools that can get the government to understand how bad the problem is and which areas are most affected,” says Wits School of Public Health Professor Mary Kawonga, who is also part of the project
In the future, the amount of real time data generated by the monitoring system could allow forecasting. An app on a phone could, for instance, warn of a coming spike in poor air quality in a particular suburb hours before it arrives.
“The forecasting is done not just for time or as a function of time but it is also done also as a function of space,” says Mellado.
While such sensors can help provide data that helps identify problems, for Mathebula, such a tool can ultimately help citizens in their fight for a healthier future. “This tool will empower the community to advocate for cleaner and healthier environments,” she concludes.
Shaun Smillie is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Thriving through the lens of memory
- Chanté Schatz
Imagine this: you’re in a dark cinema, the screen flickers, and a family’s story begins to unravel…
Faces you’ll never forget, homes left behind, memories pieced together like shards of glass. You lean in, feeling both close and distant, as if you’re witnessing someone else’s life, but somehow, it feels like your own. This is the world of Professor Tanja Sakota, where film, memory and emotion meet.
Feelings about film
For Sakota, Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Arts, storytelling isn’t just an academic pursuit, it’s a lifeline, a lens through which we navigate memory, trauma and resilience. At the heart of her work lies emotion. For her, filmmaking blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, emphasising character, memory and the human experience.
“Filmmaking is emotional. You cannot differentiate yourself from that. Each character has a backstory, emotions and the filmmaking process taps into these, not just for the character, but for the audience too.”
Sakota has been at Wits for over two decades. “I’m a proper Witsie, through and through,” she says. “It’s in my blood and veins.” Her journey into storytelling began as a Wits student in theatre but it was when she majored in Film and Television that she found her calling.
Watching footage of civilian casualties during the Gulf War, she realised the power of images and the responsibility that comes with them. “We were watching what looked like a video game but there were real civilian casualties. That search for truth sparked my research trajectory,” she recalls.
Centring the Self
In her experimental award-winning documentary Shattered Reflection, spanning four generations, she traces her family’s forced migration to South Africa after the Second World War. “I use my own experiences of grief and loss to navigate their stories,” she says. The film opens with a line that hits like a punch: ‘How do you face another day when your heart is broken?’
The sudden loss of her 18-year-old daughter in 2020 became a catalyst for Sakota’s pull towards this autoethnography, a method of research that places the self at the centre of inquiry. “When you experience trauma at that level, your life is shattered. You can’t just pick up the pieces, you have to recreate something different, like a mosaic. Autoethnography allowed me to navigate my own emotions and make sense of the stories within my family, across generations.”
Unlike traditional research, which looks from the outside in, this method places personal experience at the centre. Her book Uncovering Memory complements the film, blending theory with narrative to explore grief, resilience and intergenerational memory.
This blending of personal reflection and narrative is part of her teaching. Students are encouraged to explore their own agency, vulnerability and resilience through documentary and fiction. Sakota describes a course where students create three-minute films drawing from their personal experiences and interactions with Johannesburg. One group traced a long-lost uncle who had witnessed the Marikana massacre, while others chronicled the lives of women who worked in mines or family members who achieved extraordinary success against the odds. “When you understand vulnerability and risk within yourself, it becomes much easier to translate that when you interact with others,” she explains.
Thriving courageously
Sakota sees thriving as the outcome of this process, a combination of agency, resilience and the courage to engage with both personal and collective histories. Her approach emphasises that we cannot erase the past but we can interact with it thoughtfully, using memory and creativity through the lens to forge strength. Poetry, she notes, allowed her to voice difficult emotions when language was insufficient, while filmmaking enabled her to translate the five senses into visual narrative, combining interviews, voiceovers and cinematic imagery.
In a world still marked by trauma, inequality and shifting political tensions, Sakota’s work suggests that thriving is not about turning away from pain but engaging with it openly, creatively and with courage. Through narrative, memory and emotion, her research shows how people can make sense of their histories and find the tools to rebuild, to question and to shape spaces where resilience can take root.
Chanté Schatz is Multimedia Communications Officer at Wits University and CURIOSI.TY Picture Editor
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
No nature, no future
- Shaun Smillie
For humans to thrive, nature must thrive. For much too long, we have disregarded this fact. Now, it’s time to set that right.
For humans to thrive, nature must thrive, but for decades, this crucial element of how the world sees and tracks progress has been lacking. We track social indicators, such as education, health and income, but the value of nature for our wellbeing, as well as the planet’s wellbeing, has been completely overlooked.
Now, a group of international scientists working under the United Nations Development Programme, including Professor Laura Pereira from the Global Change Institute at Wits and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, is arguing to include nature in the way we currently measure global progress. The proposal is to introduce a new global metric – the Nature Relationship Index (NRI) – alongside the Human Development Index. The Index will aim to track how countries care for, use and protect nature.
“We are looking to do a better job at incorporating nature,” says Pereira. “The Human Development Index did a good job of looking at education and healthcare but the nature foundation around which humans thrive is largely missing.”
Three criteria will be used: whether nature is thriving and accessible, how natural resources are being used, and whether governments are making laws and investments to protect ecosystems.
The Index is still in development but the team hopes it can debut in the 2026 Human Development Report. Hopefully, it will become a regular global measure, with countries reporting updates in the same way as they do for the Human Development Index.
“The Nature Relationship Index offers a new way of understanding whether a country is truly on a sustainable path, especially in terms of how it uses and protects its natural resources to achieve wellbeing. We thrive when nature thrives.”
A perspective article on the index was recently published in the journal Nature, with the authors calling on governments and communities to help test and shape it.
Working high up in the Drakensberg, Glennon, an evolutionary biologist, and her team are studying tiny yellow flowers of the Hypoxidaceae family – better known as Star grasses – in the alpine grasslands. The study of these plants, with a flower not much bigger than a R1 coin, aims to understand how plant genomes evolve and what that means for biodiversity.
By studying hybridisation, gene flow and changes in flower colour, Glennon hopes to take a peek at the role of chromosome evolution within these plants, as well as in a different plant genus, Rhodohypoxis.
Recently, the team has also switched gears to think about genome size and how genome size within species changes across different habitat types.
“We were curious to find out if these nutrient-rich or nutrient-poor soils in the Drakensberg could predict what plants would be there and what their genome sizes would be,” says Glennon.
The preliminary findings of the Drakensberg study and Wits’ laboratory studies with Rhodohypoxis showed that a plant’s genome size differs under various soil conditions, with species in nutrient-poor alpine soils appearing to have smaller genome sizes than their sister taxa occupying more nutrient-rich lowland soils.
This could influence its survivability and be an important factor that helps sustain biodiversity. It could also predict at a species level how climate change could impact biodiversity.
“I think our success as a species depends entirely on how well we respect and treat our ecosystems,” says Glennon. “The more we know about something, the more likely we are to be responsive. An awareness of the natural world is extremely important for human resilience.”
Shaun Smillie is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Putting a price on care work
- Ufrieda Ho
Revaluing care for the way it connects people, nature and climate change can help society better withstand crises.
What does it cost to collect firewood to cook tonight’s dinner or to water the food gardens that feed a community? What about clearing litter clogging up a river?
There are no clear answers because care and care work have, for the longest time, remained unseen, under-valued and underpaid.
Phalatse’s work focuses on feminist economics. She looks at the structural inequalities in society that diminish the value of work done by women and girls, even though their roles as carers are foundational to sustaining families and communities.
According to a UN Women's report, “on average, women undertake 2.5 times more hours every day on unpaid care than men. Girls learn this early and around the world provide 160 million more hours every day on unpaid care and domestic work than boys”.
This has profound implications for climate mitigation, adaptability and resilience within communities, given that the main stewards of our natural environment are women carers.
Transforming mainstream economics
By highlighting this climate-care nexus of two systems that are deeply under- appreciated in current economic contexts, researchers hope to steer policy direction proactively.
The recognised advantages of this conceptual reframing have resulted in the launch of a grant-funded transdisciplinary research project.
Phalatse says that the work will be about the deep transformation of mainstream economics which must lean into a better way to value care and carers, in order to build a system that is robust enough to withstand the coming onslaught of extreme weather events.
“Our focus is on asking how we can reorientate or create revaluing of the economy towards care,” says Phalatse. “Deep transformation is no longer about reforming what exists but centering care in the conversation, especially in economics. We are calling for the kind of transformation of economies in which the objective is people, people’s wellbeing and their ability to thrive, as opposed to economies just about growth and profit-making.”
The new three-year research project will focus on evidence collection, creating a hub for future work in this area and creating the pathways for the research to shake-up outdated thinking and better inform policymaking.
“The key strength of the project will be to draw in more disciplines,” says Julia Taylor, also a researcher at the Centre, working on the climate-care nexus project.
Taylor points to the recent roundtable and dialogue sessions coordinated by the Wits Institute for Socioeconomic Research and the WitsH2O Centre that focused on the water crisis. It was intentionally inclusive and diverse. Participants included a visual artist who used their creative expression to make beads that look like water and an activist that gave grassroots insights into the fight for water as a basic right. Taylor’s own presentation focused on water and economics and the mounting threats of water privatisation and its use as a financial instrument internationally.
Water is becoming something to invest in and to profit from and this raises the alarm of potential exploitation and control of a scarce resource that’s critical for life itself.
“These conversations might be a bit open-ended but they spark something. In having a space to share different work we can break down silos. It enhances our understanding of key environmental issues and also shifts the way we see them,” says Taylor.
Researchers want to adopt a similar dynamic approach with the climate-care nexus work.
Caring for each other … and the environment
“We look at care as domestic work, child care, healthcare systems and education systems but the thinking hasn't really been applied in the same way to environmental care, even though issues of climate change and care are becoming more obvious and should be highlighted in climate policy,” says Taylor.
Professor Chevonne Reynolds, a lecturer in APES, is a collaborator on the project. She says that it marks a true meeting between the science faculty and economics.
Reynolds identifies learnings that can be shared. The thinking on financing care work could borrow from models in the nature space, for instance. “It’s looking at how the likes of carbon credits, biodiversity credits and green bonds are used and how they could be similarly applied to the broader care economy,” she says.
By using the framework of feminist economics on the other hand, ecologists can embrace and enlarge the frame of care within the ecological space. “We know, for instance, of people working to protect rhinos or endangered wildlife but we have neglected all the other things people do on a daily basis. One big area is the support of rural livelihoods and ecological stewardship as ecological care work,” Reynolds says, adding that care extends to volunteers doing the likes of bird counting, river clean-ups or planting indigenous gardens.
“There is incredible work being done but we are not actually taking stock of it all and it sits in completely different framings. So, building a way of bringing all of this work under one umbrella and recognising its value is important,” she says.
Reynolds believes that the climate change-care nexus research could ultimately be groundbreaking because of its potential for cross-cutting impact for finding solutions to the polycrises that mark our time.
“All these crises – the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, invasive species, pollution, health crises and equity crises all stem from the same cause, and it’s that we have forgotten to value care,” she says. “Instead of having individual social, economic or environmental policies that try to tackle systemic issues but do not really get to the root of the problem, changing the value of care can be a cross-cutting way to a solution. It’s a profound reframing.”
Ufrieda Ho is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Put a plug in it
- Ufrieda Ho
Solutions that consider social realities and smart collaboration provide the City of Johannesburg with its best chance to resolve the ongoing water crisis.
When dozens of Joburg citizens united in protest on a Saturday morning in November outside the Braamfontein Civic Centre, demanding action over the dismal state of water management in the City, it marked a tipping point.
“Collective action and grassroots activism are moving the needle on focusing attention on water rights and responsible water use and academia’s role in this is expanding,” says Professor Craig Sheridan, the Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Water Research and Head of Wits H2O, a new working research hub that brings together government, business, academia and civil society with the aim of developing real-world answers to water challenges in South Africa and on the continent.
Sheridan believes that science and research can no longer conveniently absolve themselves from taking a role in civil society action. “This is a positive thing because good science and research, when well communicated and made accessible, offer pathways to solutions, including for authorities,” he says. “At the same time, expert, independent knowledge can deepen the public’s understanding of how the City’s water system works. This boosts people’s critical awareness, which is also how authorities can better be held to account.”
Sheridan refers to recent positive moves that confront the deepening water crisis in the country with a clear-eyed approach. Civil society organisations and academia, collaborating under the Water Community Action Network have motivated for ringfencing the City of Johannesburg’s water revenue, in a call for more transparent and accountable water management.
“Revenue collection for water, along with electricity, are the two biggest income generators for the City. Ringfencing these funds is about appropriate resource allocation for things like restoring and maintaining infrastructure,” says Sheridan. Although it is a key demand, ringfencing is still to be implemented.
A constructed wetland built in a gravel-like bed to establish a microbial consortium using plants that essentially eat chemical components in discarded wastewater.
Facing up to the problem
According to Sheridan, another positive aspect is getting the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) to recognise the benefits of sharing data publicly. The online DWS dashboard gives weekly and monthly information on the City’s daily water consumption and target consumption levels. It also indicates “non-revenue” water, water lost as a result of leaks, burst pipes and theft. Sheridan points out that non-revenue water accounts for a staggeringly high 50% of total water usage.
“Joburg is using 1.7 million litres of water a day with a target of 1.356 million litres. From the dashboard, you can also see the number of leaks reported, those being fixed and those still needing work,” says Sheridan, unpacking snapshot data from the end of October 2025.
The dashboard also includes information such as dam levels and the status of the City’s reservoirs and pumping stations.
“Making this information publicly accessible enables us to understand the pressures on the City’s water systems and also goes some way towards restoring public confidence in the City and its agencies,” he adds. “The water authorities have a problem - society simply does not trust them anymore and people are very upset. Making more data available is an important strategy that allows people to see a fuller picture of what the City is up against.”
Building bridges
Professor Heidi Richards from the School of Chemistry and the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences (APES) is also part of Wits H2O. She agrees that a new role for scientists can involve working with municipalities and civil society more dynamically. “Building stronger working relationships can help guide municipalities to make smarter choices for investing in appropriate technologies and innovation,” she says.
It also helps municipalities tackle problems holistically, which she points out, is currently a glaring blind spot for local authorities and for academia.
“While we are trying to solve problems with our data and analysis, we can sometimes forget to look more deeply at the reality of massive social issues,” she adds.
For instance, illegal dumping into waterways is a huge concern but without basic services like solid waste removal or proper sanitation, many communities have no alternative.
For Richards, these real-world challenges mean that it is critical to draw from multidisciplinary perspectives.
“This is where Wits H2O works so well because we are seeing everything thanks to the input from academics in engineering, chemistry, drama, law, economics and the humanities,” she says. “We are all focused on the same conversation about what happens to our water, raising our voices along with civil society but also working with government.”
Richards concludes: “We need better cohesion, better collaboration between civil society, academia and municipalities because what is coming is a crisis that will impact us all.”
Ufrieda Ho is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
From resources to resilience
- Deryn Graham
South Africa is rich in natural resources from minerals to sun and wind. What must change for our natural wealth to become thriving wealth?
Since the discovery in South Africa of copper (1850s), diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) and subsequently of large coal deposits, the country’s mineral wealth has been a source of personal and corporate enrichment and a pillar of economic development. However, three decades into democracy, South Africa has yet to translate mineral wealth into shared prosperity.
Today, South Africa sits on mineral reserves valued at more than $2.5 trillion. The country consistently appears in the top 10 globally for 16 separate commodities but its failure to fulfill its potential and truly thrive as a mining nation can be attributed to two main reasons: the country remains a raw ore supplier, failing to beneficiate its own resources and maximise on their value, and huge under investment in exploration, due largely to regulatory dysfunction and policy uncertainty.
Before we can consider beneficiating our abundant deposits of traditional and ‘new’ minerals and rare earth elements – we need to know exactly what South Africa has under the earth.
According to Susan Webb, Associate Professor in the School of Geosciences, exploration has been choked over the last two decades by regulatory constraints. Geosciences mapping is under-resourced and µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø the only university in southern Africa offering a range of degrees in the field, compared to around 120 in China. As a result, the country captures less than 1% of global mining exploration investment.
“For now, it is more viable to invest in exploration elsewhere in Africa than in South Africa. We are limited by, amongst other aspects, a lack of policy and regulation in the use of technology such as drones for research and exploration. We also have a skills base of postgraduates that could become involved in research but we are unable to deploy them effectively,” says Webb.
Dr Kenneth Creamer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics and Finance notes that when mineral rights were transferred to the state in the early 2000s with the intention of promoting increased levels of mineral exploration, paradoxically, activity largely dried up due to regulatory uncertainties and the failure to put in place essential planning and management tools such as an effective mining cadastre.
Beyond our colonial legacy
The approval by cabinet in May 2025 of the Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy and the adoption of the Integrated Resource Plan 2025, together with a new mining cadastre, represent the country’s most ambitious attempt yet to move beyond its colonial legacy as an extractive economy.
The Critical Minerals Strategy targets six pillars, focusing on exploration promotion, beneficiation and industrialisation, infrastructure development, skills and innovation, environmental stewardship, and regional integration. The vision includes developing local battery manufacturing capabilities, establishing green hydrogen production facilities and creating integrated mineral processing hubs.
Creamer believes that to achieve this vision and to develop manufacturing capacity, the country needs to restore its electricity abundance and take advantage of the country’s location in the world’s sun belt.
“From having one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the world, thanks to the rich coal seams which drove the industrialisation of the 19th and 20th centuries, South Africa has for the past twenty years experienced an unstable, unreliable and expensive supply to homes and businesses,” he says.
Millions of jobs in renewable energy and related manufacturing could be created with appropriate strategic interventions. Creamer and Webb both emphasise that a lack of political will, more than technical or financial constraints is the primary barrier to unlocking the country’s mineral potential. Without appropriate strategic interventions, mineral producers like South Africa could remain trapped as raw ore suppliers while most value-added manufacturing happens elsewhere. The Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy offers some hope as it promises regulatory reform that actually works, infrastructure investment at scale, targeted exploration incentives and skills development for the future economy.
"South Africa has hundreds of years of wealth and job opportunities locked underground," says Webb. The question is whether the country has the political will to free them – or whether its $2.5 trillion mineral endowment will remain exactly that – potential trapped underground while other nations build the technologies of the future.”
Deryn Graham is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
What teachers and students need to thrive
- Ruksana Osman
Are we preparing students for our past or their futures? Universities need to redefine the relationship between student success and teaching excellence.
Universities have existed for over 1 000 years, during which time the role of the university professor was fundamentally that of a teacher, but during the 20th Century, it has evolved to include that of researcher.
By the latter part of the 20th Century, at many universities, the researcher role overtook that of teacher in status, prestige and financial reward, leading many academics to focus less on teaching. Perverse institutional reward structures exacerbated this situation. Status and financial gain drove increasing attention to research and decreasing attention to teaching.
This situation worked when university education was available only to a small elite and governments covered most of the costs. However, it became unacceptable when higher education massified in the 1990s and student populations grew in both size and diversity. Excellence in teaching became essential if the majority of students were to thrive academically.
The advent of the 21st Century brought rapid global changes in technology that make good university teaching critical. Some 25 years into the digital age, we are experiencing the widespread availability of powerful AI tools, the increasing appearance of AI-generated content on the internet (some designed deliberately to mislead) and the use and misuse of social media that make students vulnerable on many levels.
Teaching and research intensity
To enhance university instruction that holds both teaching and research in equal esteem requires systemic interventions nationally and at institutional levels. ‘Dual intensive’ universities balance out the emphasis on research.
Fortunately, many South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø universities are taking this seriously by revising probation and promotion processes and by providing professional learning opportunities for university teachers. At the national systemic level, the Department of Higher Education and Training’s 2018 National Framework for Enhancing Academics as University Teachers was an important intervention.
But is this enough?
Social justice education
Globally, universities have come under considerable criticism from governments, corporates and students demanding to understand the relevance of university curricula for the daily lives and realities of students.
Universities have been criticised for being out of touch with students’ lives, for teaching courses that are outdated and for content that is Eurocentric, unresponsive, alienating and disempowering – both for those teaching it and learning it.
Wits University receives thousands of applicants annually but admits only a small percentage. Most of our talented students come from historically underserved communities. Offering students from these communities a world-class learning experience and enabling them to succeed and overcome the legacies of exclusion is about teaching excellence. It’s about being pedagogically responsive and socially just. Student success in our context is not just a pedagogical matter but also a social justice matter.
Are socially just ways of teaching even possible in complex university environments like ours? Are we able – or prepared – to put the student learning experience at the centre of teaching excellence? Do our norms disproportionately burden some staff or students – second language speakers or digitally less experienced students? Through teaching excellence, are we preparing students for our past or their futures?
There are two factors that are integral to teaching excellence: nurturing success and improving the student learning experience. While education is known to reproduce inequality and injustice, it remains the source of hope and aspiration for new imaginaries and possibilities.
Here are four elements that provide a tentative framework for thinking about how we re-centre the student learning experience in our understanding of teaching excellence:
Student success does not belong in one silo
Teaching excellence that is underpinned by social justice draws on several literacies – artistic, quantitative, technological, digital, visual and affective – to enhance the student learning experience. Herein lies the potential for exploring opportunities within and across university classrooms and structures.
The student experience should be intentionally designed so that students succeed. This implies that students need multiple levels of support – which may sit in several spaces across the university – and that these spaces are connected and communicate in the service of student learning and success.
Collaboration and solidarity
Connected, un-siloed work opens spaces for working together, for reciprocity and collaboration towards socially just pedagogies and student success. Collaboration advances and endorses a politics of solidarity. It allows for connected ways of knowing our students and how to support them to succeed.
Knowing our students means that data-driven decision making about student success must also identify barriers to learning and institute initiatives that are timely, just and responsive, to ensure teaching excellence.
Most important, such connected work must be supportive of staff workloads, recognise teaching for promotion and provide the necessary resources to advance teaching excellence, student success and staff professional learning journeys.
Recognition of struggle intersections
A just approach to teaching excellence appreciates the intersection with other social justice struggles in the university beyond those of learning and teaching. It recognises the need to engage the material - structural, epistemic and pedagogical - as constituents of social justice, i.e., there are interconnections between these dimensions when one speaks about teaching excellence.
Institutional culture
We cannot assume that the university is innocent and its cultures beyond question. A deep engagement with institutional cultures and practices is vital if socially just teaching excellence for student success is to thrive and take root more broadly across the global academy.
As scholars of learning and teaching we must pull together in the finest tradition of academic life to redefine the relationship between student success and teaching excellence to renew the social contract for education.
Professor Ruksana Osman, the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, is responsible for coordination of the academic project across Wits University. She was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Advancement, Human Resources and Transformation, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Head of the School of Education. A Professor of Education, she holds the UNESCO Chair in Teacher Education for Diversity and Development and is recognised for the quality and relevance of her work in higher education – as a teacher and researcher – in pursuit of socially just education.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Problem first, solution second
- Deryn Graham
The traditional model of philanthropy in Africa is very different from the concept of µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy.
Coined by Anne Isabelle Thackeray Ritchie in 1885, the proverb ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’ highlights the significant difference between the impact of short-term social intervention and empowering someone with the skills to be self-sufficient.
According to Bhekinkosi Moyo, Adjunct Professor in the and Director of the , the role and model of philanthropic giving – in Africa as elsewhere – was historically designed to assist underdeveloped and under-resourced countries, communities and even individuals to thrive independently of the donor after the funding ended. In other words, teaching them to fish.
However, causes and beneficiaries have historically been cherry picked by institutional and private philanthropists. Western philanthropy has typically been aligned with democratic principles, funding governance and legal programmes, health, education and human rights areas, often tied to a country’s foreign policies. Regimes in other parts of the world have been guided by different agendas, benefitting causes such as labour issues – connecting philanthropy with global politics. On the other hand, individuals have deployed their private resources according to their own particular interests, giving to causes that they care about, whether people, animals or a movement.
There is no doubt that traditional philanthropy has played a critical role in Africa’s development, particularly in the health sector. Melinda French Gates explains why philanthropy is beneficial: “At its best, philanthropy centres people who are being left behind and helps take on problems that business and government cannot solve alone. When it comes to piloting new programmes or testing new ideas, philanthropy is uniquely positioned to make the high-risk, high-reward investments to figure out what works.”
She adds: “Philanthropy is all about partnership – you partner with experts in the field. You partner with people with lived experience of the issues that you are working on. As you uncover new solutions, you work with businesses and governments to make sure those solutions reach as many people as possible. So, while I believe that philanthropy has an important role to play in driving progress, it is a supporting role.”
The Gates Foundation has announced that it will disburse all its wealth and cease operations by 2045.
Donor fatigue is real
Times are changing – where institutional philanthropy used to have guidelines, it now has strategies. The recent withdrawal of USAID and Pepfar funding (albeit aid, different from philanthropic giving) has exposed the cracks in government systems that have long relied on external funding to fill the gaps where governments are failing to fulfill a function.
“So many resources have been poured into Africa but the social ills that they are supposed to alleviate remain. Even philanthropists require a return on investment and a timeline for results,” says Moyo. “Donor fatigue is real.”
Alternative forms of philanthropy
A new generation of philanthropic leaders is coming through, brought up differently from the parents that originally established family foundations. Alex Soros is a good example – when he took over the Open Society Foundation from his father George, he laid off 40% of the international staff and announced significant changes to the operating model including a shift toward political engagement, prioritising national level political arenas over global forums. These philanthropic entrepreneurs have a different approach to how and to whom they give.
According to Moyo, this is an example of the philanthropy ecosystem regenerating itself.
‘Venture philanthropy’ and ‘impact investing’, of which Nigerian philanthropist Tony Elumelu is a proponent, are examples of new forms of philanthropy designed to offset the impact of capitalism.
Building µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy
In South Africa, we have the skills and the capacity to adopt our own model of µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy, argues Moyo. Although many of our local foundations – such as the Motsepe Foundation and the Thabo Mbeki Foundation – have characteristics and frameworks borrowed from Western institutions, they are a combination of µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy and philanthropy in Africa.
Moyo says that outside of Africa, philanthropy is a formal discipline. “Our interpretations have been labelled ‘indigenous versions’, patronised by the west. In fact, South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø models of giving and support, including stokvels and burial societies, are based on the cultural commitment to not leaving anyone behind.”
Stokvels were started by rural women to fill the financial gaps and needs left by their migrant worker menfolk, in a demonstration of mutual support. Even if a family can afford to bury a loved one, µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø culture says that they do not need to bear that financial responsibility alone and a book of pledges will do the rounds. Even so-called ‘Black tax’ is a form of philanthropy, as financial support extends way beyond the concept of nuclear families. This is Africa’s ‘many to many’ response to crisis or need, in a pooling of resources.
Another model of non-financial philanthropy is giving in kind.
“The biggest donation towards South Africa’s democracy was solidarity in the struggle against apartheid shown by other countries, institutions and individuals,” says Moyo.
This is in-kind giving and may also include food or even buildings, such as Anglo American’s 45 Main Street, recently donated to the Maharishi Invincibility Institute and another building on the same road – The Crucible – given to the Wits Business School to establish a new entrepreneurship centre.
These alternative models offer South Africa the opportunity to rethink the ways to thrive without relying on traditional philanthropy from outside.
“We are looking for a form of philanthropy that is developed, practised and led by µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs,” says Moyo.
Problem first, solution second
In Africa we do things the other way round. In the west, the accumulation of wealth comes first and then the search for how to spend it. Here, we identify the problem first and only then look for ways in which to solve it.
Rwanda’s Girinka programme follows this model. To address the challenge of poverty, indigent families are given a cow. As a result, child nutrition has improved with access to milk and small-scale food gardens flourish with a ready source of fertiliser. Problem first, solution second, driven in an organised, structured way by the Rwandan government.
In another example, in response to the West µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø Ebola outbreak, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, then Chair of the µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø Union Commission, mobilised high net worth individuals and the private sector in Africa in the fight against the disease. Kenya has an endowment fund located at the Kenya Community Development Foundation which brings in local individual and community donors to address educational provision and access deficits.
Role of the µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø Diaspora
What of the role of the µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø diaspora? Moyo believes that everybody has a responsibility to give back to their home country. The growth of ‘hometown associations’ with social frameworks for mutual assistance among immigrants, plus remittances, cumulatively represent significant funds that support families, extended families and wider communities.
“Africa has the structures, cultural practices and collective as well as individual wealth that we can redirect into µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy. The main challenge we face is the mindset of politicians, policy makers and even our communities,” says Moyo. “If we can switch mindsets, taking back the power to determine what we need and to shape the philanthropy agenda, our next stage would be to harness institutions, indigenous knowledge systems and apply the principles of ethical practices and corporate social responsibility.”
South Africa has agency
From a developmental point of view, South Africa is very advanced. We have immense wealth underground but immense poverty on the surface. We should not be struggling. We should be a beacon of how µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy works. However, we lack the required leadership and discipline to implement a model that enables Africa to thrive through its own resources, relationships and ideas.
Is it enough? Can these alternative forms of philanthropy replace the traditional philanthropy and foreign aid that has been retracted? Should we be looking to other sources of funding from BRICS countries, the Gulf States and the Far East? Will strategic partnerships, innovation, start-ups and commericalisation provide the requisite resources for the future?
“We do need to start thinking more broadly about resource mobilisation that includes exploring diverse funding opportunities to secure the future of the continent,” says Moyo.
“This is what we are striving for at the Centre on µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø Philanthropy and Social Investment. We are actively seeking to advance research, teaching and advocacy and to build an inclusive, sustainable philanthropy ecosystem that empowers people rather than one that perpetuates dependency.”
Deryn Graham is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
The science of liver regeneration
- Leanne Rencken
The liver may already know how to heal itself but Wits scientists are exploring innovative ways to help it along.
Advances in gene editing, nanomedicine and 3D bioprinting are pushing the limits of liver regeneration and reframing what recovery means.
At the Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit (AGTRU), researchers are developing genetic treatments that could permanently disable the hepatitis B virus (HBV), one of the world’s most persistent and under-recognised causes of liver disease – and a particular burden on South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø healthcare.
‘Scissors’ snip virus
Gene therapy uses DNA and RNA to achieve therapeutic results. At the AGTRU, molecular “scissors”, known as TALENs, snip the HBV DNA inside liver cells, forcing the virus to repair itself imperfectly and become inactive.
“By cutting the DNA, it induces an error-prone repair mechanism that disables the virus permanently,” explains Professor Patrick Arbuthnot, Director of the AGTRU.
Unlike conventional antivirals, which initially suppress infection but enable its return once treatment stops, the TALENs method aims for a lasting cure. “It’s much better if you can get to the source of the problem, rather than treat the result,” says Arbuthnot.
By eliminating the infection entirely, the body can begin to regenerate healthy liver tissue, offering patients the possibility to thrive.
The four R's of drug delivery
While the AGTRU tackles disease at the genetic level, the Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform (WADDP) focuses on healing at the cellular and structural level. Its work centres on biomimicry, designing materials that imitate how the body repairs itself.
“Although liver tissue can regenerate, it cannot do so efficiently in the presence of chronic HBV infection that eventually leads to severe damage,” says Professor Yahya Choonara, Director of the WADDP. “Early intervention with more precise delivery technologies for genes is critical either to cure or halt ongoing inflammation and tissue scarring.”
The WADDP team uses 3D bioprinting to create biodegradable scaffolds that are seeded with living cells. Once implanted, these structures help the body’s tissue to regrow and eventually replace them. “We use the body’s surviving liver cells to help regenerate itself,” explains Choonara.
To understand and strengthen the body’s own regenerative responses better, the WADDP team studies the secretome – the microscopic chemical signals that cells send to coordinate repair. “We are trying to amplify the body’s own language of healing,” says Choonara.
For the WADDP, effective treatment is as much about precision as innovation. Choonara describes this principle as the four Rs of drug delivery: delivering the right dose, to the right patient, at the right site in the body, at the right time. It’s a philosophy that guides how new materials are designed and how medicines reach diseased tissue more directly, with fewer side effects.
Regenerating Africa
Both the AGTRU and the WADDP are challenging the traditional approach to chronic illness, shifting the focus from indefinite treatment, often limited by access or adherence, to targeted, once-off repair.
It’s also part of a broader transformation: science made in Mzansi, for Mzansi. As Arbuthnot says, “It’s important that we train students locally — these are skills that can’t only live in the Global North.”
Affordability and accessibility are key to that vision. One example is the AGTRU’s Africa-grown cashew-nut lipid project. Nut shells, usually discarded as agricultural waste, contain a by-product that can be refined into lipids capable of carrying RNA therapies safely into cells. “Working in Africa, we are very aware of issues around access,” says Arbuthnot. “This project is an example of ways in which we can make things more affordable.”
At Wits, thriving means both patients and scientists flourish. Across the AGTRU and the WADDP, teams are building local expertise while contributing to a rapidly evolving international field. “We are on par globally…but our focus is to have an Africa-centric vision,” notes Choonara, whose platform trains dozens of postgraduate students and postdoctoral scholars, many of them first-generation scientists, to carry this work forward.
Both research teams operate in highly competitive fields, advancing South Africa’s growing presence in regenerative science through international collaborations and the patents that protect their work.
As these technologies evolve, they also raise complex questions about safety, equity and the line between healing and enhancement. Yet the work is firmly grounded in realism and responsibility. “We don’t oversell what we do,” says Choonara, while Arbuthnot emphasises a conservative approach. It’s a reminder that even with such extraordinary promise, progress must undergo years of testing, funding, ethics application and regulatory review before it reaches patients.
Leanne Rencken is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Getting better together
- Beth Amato
Conquering diseases such as cancer requires many minds. A transdisciplinary approach, via hubs, can enable thriving.
“How can engineers, pathologists, ethicists, computer scientists and statisticians form a robust, multidisciplinary team to diagnose cancer faster, design our own biotechnologies and push training and innovation?”
This was the question that galvanised Professor Reubina Wadee, Co-Director of the new Wits Digital Pathology Hub (DPH). Wadee figured that solving critical problems, particularly in the swift diagnosis and treatment of cancer, requires people to ask different questions.
“We need to get a range of people with diverse skills together to tackle this problem,” says Professor Tanya Augustine, also a Co-Director of the DPH.
Pathological shortage
Necessity is the mother of invention and the DPH enables multidisciplinary clinical interrogation and bolsters the anatomical pathologists in the public sector – only 38 in number – who handle thousands of specimens.
A shortage of pathologists must be addressed in the long term through nurturing young medical students and inspiring them to become pathologists.
“Embedding digital pathology in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching means our future clinicians will speak both medical and computational languages,” says Augustine.
Scientist-AI co-creation
Traditional pathology requires specialists to manually analyse thousands of slides, most of which show common malignancies such as breast and prostate cancers. The DPH aims to develop the capacity for artificial intelligence and digital imaging for streamlining cancer diagnosis.
“By training algorithms to digitise and triage these cases, we aim to free up pathologists’ time for rarer, more complex diagnoses,” explains Dr Carl Chen, a member of the DPH who brings his genetics research expertise from the Wits Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø National Cancer Registry.
Augustine says, “We want to make digital pathology both faster and fairer. The systems available now are expensive and proprietary. We are asking how we can build scalable, home-grown tools that work for µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø contexts?” She says that the skills to do so are readily available through multidisciplinary collaborations with Wits teams in information engineering, computer science, the Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute and the WITS Biohub.
Health research ecosystem
On the busy intersection of Carse O’ Gowrie Road and Houghton Drive in Johannesburg is one of Wits’ most ambitious projects of the last century: The Wits Interdisciplinary and Translational Science Biohub (WITS BioHub), a first-of-its-kind entity to reimagine how health research ecosystems are the life and soul of innovation.
It is a new campus where science, once in silos, now comes together with other disciplines to form an integrated system to transform Africa’s healthcare future. The WITS BioHub represents a R1.3 billion capital investment, designed to sustain innovative research, provide opportunities for collaboration, commercialisation, clinical trial services and biotech partnerships.
Professor Shabir Madhi, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, says: “The WITS BioHub represents the next frontier for the Faculty of Health Sciences. It will give our scientists and partners the infrastructure to turn ideas into diagnostics, vaccines and treatments that save lives. More than that, it positions South Africa as a leader in health innovation, building solutions that respond to our own challenges while contributing globally.”
Bedside-to-bench-to-breakthrough
Africa carries intersecting burdens of disease where infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV, and non-communicable diseases including cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses, are on the rise. Yet Africa contributes very marginally to global health solutions. The WITS BioHub was the answer.
“We want a place where patients’ health needs, discovery science, implementation science, as well as the potential for commercial spinouts, can underpin our bedside-to-bench-to-breakthrough vision,” says Professor Aletta Millen, Assistant Dean for Research in the Faculty of Health Sciences, for whom the Wits BioHub is also about deeper structural transformation.
“The WITS BioHub addresses fragmentation and brings pockets of excellence together in one place to drive mission-driven research,” says Millen and references Africa’s rich data, innovative technology and entrepreneurial prowess. “We must solve our own problems and not rely on expensive proprietary software or expertise from the Global North. The rate of change is rapid. Transdisciplinary collaboration is not optional, but critical to our shared future.”
Beth Amato is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
Chemical chaos and deathly data silence
- Tamsin Mackay
Menopause may be making itself heard in mainstream media but women across low- and middle-income countries need to shout louder.
“The menopause” has become popular. It’s a celebrity bandwagon, a podcast confession, a late-night show discussion. Yet research into the impact on women’s health is still gasping in its race to catch up, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). As Nigel Crowther, Wits Research Professor in Chemical Pathology says, “There’s no data on the impact of menopause in women in Africa, which is a disgrace.”
‘Invisible’ women data dearth
Crowther and Dr Nicole Jaff, Honorary Lecturer in Chemical Pathology at Wits and a board member on both the International Menopause Society and the South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø Menopause Society, recently wrote an editorial for the journal Climacteric commenting on the untold story of menopause and how, despite research into specific health risks that emerge during the menopause transition in western countries, there is a “scarcity of menopause-related research in LMICs”.
Jaff was appalled that there wasn’t visibility into how 80% of the women in the region aged reproductively, which inspired her work. In a study conducted in Soweto on 702 black, urban South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø women, published in 2015, she explains: “We did strong quantitative research and staged menopause correctly by bleeding patterns, verifying them via blood assays and conducting a wide range of tests to determine cardiometabolic risk factors, menopause symptoms and cognitive changes across menopause stages.”
She explains that the women were delighted to be part of the study and to learn about menopause since it is not easy for women in the resource stressed public healthcare system to see a gynaecologist. Most study participants had never had an annual checkup or even a lipogram, a blood test to screen for heart disease which is especially relevant to menopause because hormonal changes affect a woman’s lipid profile and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Crowther, Jaff and colleagues based at Wits are among the few groups looking into the health impact of the menopause transition, particularly around cardiometabolic and cardiovascular diseases in µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø women.
Heart health and menopause
“It has been surprising,” says Crowther. “We didn’t see any relationship between menopause and cardiometabolic or cardiovascular diseases in urban populations in South Africa or Kenya, but in rural communities in Ghana and Burkina Faso in West Africa, we did. While our hypothesis isn’t yet proven, we believe that this may be linked to the high prevalence of obesity in the urban populations but we still need to test this theory.”
SA mum on menopause
Why is research on menopause absent in Africa? While studies on menopause are well funded and the topic is highly visible in other parts of the world, in Africa the medical community is battling health on multiple fronts. There’s HIV, tuberculosis and limited access to funding and infrastructure. Menopause slips down the priority list in the face of infectious diseases and nominal healthcare.
“We’ve got a resource stressed public healthcare system alongside different cultural and ethnic attitudes and this is seen as a private issue. It isn’t the norm to talk menopause for many black, sub-Saharan µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø women,” says Jaff. “They don’t often discuss it with their mothers and there isn’t handed-down information. Our study was one of the first examining the menopause transition and reproductive ageing in black South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø women.”
There is also silence around menopause but in Africa it’s the kind of silence that comes from limited understanding and knowledge. This is not a conversation banned by society; it’s one that isn’t being had properly.
Hot topic
“There isn’t silence on the topic – menopause has become the hottest topic on the planet in the past decade,” says Jaff. “However, in the public health sector in South Africa you have a resource stressed system with nurses and medical practitioners who have limited knowledge on menopause – it is undertaught and is not a topic that is widely discussed, though our study showed that women were aware of menopause.”
Now think of the impact of the symptoms on women who don’t know what’s happening to them or why they are suddenly experiencing night sweats, brain fog, hair loss and dry skin. They don’t know that fluctuating hormone changes and declines in oestrogen and progesterone may be putting them at risk of cardiovascular disease or osteoporosis.
Studies have shown that vasomotor symptoms (hot flushes and night sweats) are not necessarily harmless and may increase the risk of cardiometabolic disease and impact on the quality of life of women.
More research is needed to generate effective information on modifiable risk factors that may help alleviate these symptoms and improve midlife health in women in South Africa and beyond.
Education is critical, as is increased funding – because without adequate funding, menopause will keep losing ground to other healthcare claims.
Tamsin Mackay is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
The most powerful drug of all
- Lem Chetty
It’s a simple premise, movement is medicine – not just a mantra for gym buffs and marathon runners. It’s a prescription for a good life.
Movement is the missing link in South Africa’s health story. It is that simple. Researchers at Wits have proven without a doubt that movement can prevent and reduce the effects of disease, including cancers, improve recovery and protect mental health.
Constantinou’s team has conducted research that shows that even a single day of inactivity can trigger measurable changes in the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems. “On the other hand, physical activity releases signalling molecules that influence cell metabolism, regeneration and immunity. The effects are profound and they start with something as simple as standing up.”
Sitting is the new smoking
“Any movement is better than none, so even standing instead of sitting makes a measurable difference to your health,” says Constantinou.
Research on movement in the department spanned a cross-section of adults, including blue-collar workers, office employees, students and patients recovering from illness.
They found that prehabilitation (preparing a patient for surgery by optimising their physical and mental health beforehand) and rehabilitation through exercise improved recovery, reduced complications and enhanced quality of life. “Exercise before, during and after illness is one of the most powerful interventions we have and yet it is under-prescribed,” says Constantinou.
The other, darker side of that coin is that a sedentary lifestyle kills.
Standing up for movement
It is enough to make one stand up immediately when reading Professor Philippe Gradidge’s research. He has spent years studying physical activity, obesity and sedentary behaviour, including the effects of ‘standing desks’.
Gradidge says that movement is not about extreme sport, it is about micro-movements that add up in the day, week and over a lifetime. “In our studies, we have seen that small changes like walking, standing or light stretching can meaningfully enhance both physical and mental wellbeing,” he says.
His team has shown that standing desks improve posture, reduce back pain and sharpen focus amongst office workers, while structured walking programmes improve heart health and mood among South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø women. “Movement is medicine – and it works even in small doses,” says Gradidge.
He dispels the common benchmarks for those hooked on programmes linked to medical aid behavioural change schemes: “You don’t need 10 000 steps to start feeling better. In fact, emerging evidence suggests that as few as 2 000 to 4 000 steps daily can help reduce depressive symptoms.”
Gradidge adds, “In our studies, movement has helped people manage pain, regulate stress, improve health outcomes such as elevated blood pressure and become more aware of their physical state and movement patterns. It’s not just about performance. Rather, it’s about participating in environments where people can move joyfully and safely, free from barriers."
Most accessible prescription
Jon Patricios, Professor of Sports Science and Exercise Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences believes that despite small steps making a difference, we should aim to adhere to the World Health Organization’s guidelines of 300 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise, for all its well-described benefits.
Patricios is prolific in this area, working with corporates to establish and enhance exercise as medicine. Working in partnership with Discovery Vitality, Patricios was recently lead author of a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showing the effect of regular exercise on cancer.
“Knowing that as little as 60 minutes of regular weekly exercise may reduce the likelihood of cancer progression by 27% and death by 47% should encourage all doctors to use exercise as medicine,” says Patricios. “Regular physical activity is the most powerful and accessible prescription that we can give our patients.”
New sports complex
Wits University will launch the Wits Brian and Dorothy Zylstra Sports Complex in 2026, a state-of-the-art integrated facility for training, research and clinical practice. The Complex promises worldclass research and therapeutic facilities, including an aquatics centre and a residence for elite athletes. A network of healthcare professionals and scientists including researchers, biokineticists, physiotherapists and other medical experts will be housed under one roof, with access for students and members of the public.
Dr Georgia Torres, a researcher in exercise and mental wellbeing, who serves as the Chief Operations Officer of the Complex, says that movement should be part of everyone’s life, even in low-resource settings where formal exercise is often out of reach. “Movement gives people agency,” she says.
Designing a society that promotes movement
The challenge lies in designing a society that supports movement.
“Our built environment isn’t designed for active living,” says Gradidge. “Pavements, parks, public transport - they should all invite movement, not restrict it.”
Free-to-access park runs, for instance, make active living easy and convenient, in a country that is showing increasingly reduced levels of exercise.
Torres says that the Zylstra Complex, as well as Wits’ commitment to the Global Alliance for the Promotion of Physical Activity, which unites researchers, policy leaders and communities in embedding movement into everyday life, represents positive progress.
“Movement is prevention, connection and empowerment,” says Torres. “It’s the simplest science of all but the hardest habit to build.”
Lem Chetty is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
50 is the new 60
- Beth Amato
Africa’s population is living longer but not necessarily healthier. Research on brain health, gut health and robust policy can change this phenomenon.
In the Vhembe District Municipality in Limpopo, there are 2 000 centenarians, according to a 2022 Census SA report. Vhembe is not an official Blue Zone (where there are high rates of people living to 100) but many of its 100-year-olds live in ways that echo the world’s oldest populations: eating traditional foods, staying active into old age, maintaining close social bonds and living with strong spiritual and cultural convictions.
When 101-year-old Muyahavho Maria Muedi, who lives in the Vhembe region, was interviewed by The Citizen, she also attributed her ripened years to listening to elders and to avoiding alcohol, drugs, sugar and fatty foods.
Okinawa, Japan, has one of the highest rates of people living to 100 in the world. Here, people not only live longer but also live well, with fewer chronic diseases or later onset of illnesses. Vhembe’s centenarians, however, are outliers in a region where people are living longer but not always healthier.
Rapid transitions and NCDS
Elsewhere in the country and across southern Africa, people live, on average, to 65 years old. However, about nine of those years are spent in ill health, according to the World Health Organization’s universal health coverage tracking. Notably, women live longer than men but those years are still spent in poor health. While a longer lifespan in the region is mainly attributed to preventing and treating infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and others have increased rapidly.
Agincourt’s longitudinal ageing data confirm that people are living longer but that they are acquiring non-communicable diseases younger than the global average. “This seems to coincide with what we term a ‘rapidly transitioning society’ where profound, fast-paced economic, social, lifestyle and behavioural changes interact with complex health and life-course dynamics,” explains Gomez-Olive.
Not forgetting dementias
As sub-Saharan Africa’s population ages, dementia cases are set to rise sharply by 2050. In South Africa, estimates point to more than a million people living with the condition in the near future. “This deepens the social, economic and community pressures already felt in the rural areas,” says Professor Stephen Tollman, Agincourt’s Director.
He notes that brain health runs through every stage of life and every sector of society. “If countries integrate brain health into what Africa is already doing well, the continent can protect ageing citizens and sustain our economies,” he says.
Elevating the aged
Although older populations are traditionally viewed as frail and unable to work at full capacity, in low- and middle-income countries like South Africa, older people take on central and productive roles in their communities.
The impact of NCDs and dementia presents a challenge for the older population in Agincourt and indeed for the wider community of which they are a critical part. Older people are often the chief caregivers in extended families owing to labour migration and the remnants of the HIV crisis, where many younger people died. The old-age pension is also heavily relied on as a source of income in some communities.
Research on what makes older adults strong and resilient while others experience early and rapid decline is therefore necessary and has become one of the most urgent public health issues of our time, according to Tollman.
Gut feelings
Alongside social and clinical determinants, Africa’s scientists are uncovering biological pathways that help explain why some people age better than others.
Researchers at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) are investigating the gut microbiome.
The gut is home to trillions of microbes and as much genetic diversity as the human genome itself.
These microbes produce metabolites that regulate inflammation, metabolic health, immunity and even aspects of cognition.
Ageing healthily from conception
Drawing on the Africa Wits-INDEPTH Partnership for Genomic Research longitudinal data from Soweto and Agincourt, scientists are mapping how lifestyle, environment and genetics shape these microbial communities and in turn how they influence frailty, diabetes risk, cardiovascular disease and cognitive ageing.
“The microbiome gives us a biological lens to see how lifelong exposures accumulate and how ageing can be made healthier, not just longer,” says Dr Luicer Olubayo, a researcher at the Institute.
What is evident is that diseases like HIV, diabetes or dementia are no isolated events of older age. Many of the pathways that drive risk are already set in motion decades earlier. “Healthy ageing begins at conception, essentially,” says Gomez-Olive, taking us right back to the beginning of our life cycle.
Beth Amato is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
This feature is part of a series on what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives. Also read:
South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families are not all nuclear and members are not necessarily related but innovative socioeconomic strategies enable thriving and connection.
How do families in South Africa and people living as family, thrive?
Over the years, Wits researchers have conducted several studies tracking the resilience of South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families and found that they thrive when the systems and emotional connections between members are secure and aligned.
These systems include social grants that arrive timeously, affordable childcare, the availability of quality healthcare services and violence-free environments.
But this isn’t always attainable in a country like ours. Aside from South Africa being one of the most unequal societies in the world, which creates its own immense economic pressure, our history also inhibits thriving systems. It’s got to do with roots and economics.
Uprooted
Historical migrant labour policies that restricted black and coloured communities from living together, while white families were allowed to move around as a unit, affects family structures today.
Dr Motlalepule Nathane-Taulela, a researcher in the Wits Department of Social Work, says that high inequality contributes to the heterogenous (diverse) nature of South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families, while the nuclear family is historically found in middle-class communities.
“Most South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø households are either headed by women or children, and this is why family looks and means different things to different individuals. Evidence shows that black and coloured families were affected by apartheid policies and the situation has worsened over the years,” explains Nathane-Taulela.
The cost-of-living, rising food prices and high unemployment rates have resulted in people living at home longer or moving back. This structural heterogeneity (diversity) means that extended family networks are common in many South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø homes.
“Families are not just blood families,” says Wits Professor of Psychology Maria Marchetti-Mercer. “Deep interpersonal connections can also be formed with other people who become significant in our lives."
This significance plays out in roles ranging from care and companionship to economic and practical.
Extended families and ‘work’
In modern Mzansi families, grandparents often live-in to provide childcare, while their adult children work and earn, which creates a shared support system.
Adaptive structures like these also challenge traditional gender roles. Job scarcity often leads to women participating in the informal market and becoming the breadwinners.
"This is [informal] work like selling goods or running childcare centres, which may challenge traditional gender roles and empower women-led households,” says Marchetti-Mercer.
Women are also going back to indigenous forms of socialisation and participating in stokvels and social clubs to save collectively, while churches start food gardens and offer counseling.
Informal labour and caregiving is still work and Nathane-Taulela emphasises that perceptions about informal work – where many only regard formal employment as legitimate labour – need to change.
"Children are more protected when women have an income,” says Nathane-Taulela. Arguably, recognising informal work as legitimate can help families to thrive.
Tech (dis)connects
Children either living with one parent or with extended family while their parents work in the city results in families relying on technology to sustain and nurture relationships. As such, technology has become both a lifeline and a barrier for South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families.
Cellphones and apps like WhatsApp make it possible for care to continue at a distance – giving children security and the assurance that they matter.
However, these connections are threatened by the digital divide caused by unequal digital connections and access to the internet.
“In order to be able to use technology such as cell phones and apps including WhatsApp, money is required to buy devices and data. Families experiencing financial stress must prioritise their needs and things like food, rent and school fees have to take precedence over data,” says Machetti-Mercer.
Dr Sarah Naicker, a researcher in the Wits Centre of Excellence in Human Development, emphasises that while digital tools can support learning, connection and access to health or parenting information – especially in remote areas – this tech can also displace interaction, increase sedentary behaviour and expose children to harmful content.
“Finding a balance is key,” says Naicker.
Structural support matters
South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families, though faced with economic, historical and systemic challenges, continue finding strategies to thrive.
Sometimes, simple things like quality time and emotional security may just be enough for families to have meaningful relations.
“Children who experience adversity but remain in emotionally supportive households have markedly better mental health and social outcomes as adults,” says Naicker.
Enabling systems and policies that integrate social protection, violence prevention, quality early learning, caregiver mental health support and inclusive digital access remain crucial to helping families thrive.
Marcia Monyana is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
This feature is part of a series on what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives. Also read:
Although young professional adults mostly live online today, thriving in real life is about intentionality, not rejecting technology.
For young adults entering the workforce today, the rules of career and life building have changed. Young professionals are stepping into a post-pandemic world where remote work, digital communication and online performance are the norm.
At the same time, their lives are punctuated by the rhythm of influencers, podcasts, fitness trends, lifestyle hacks and the ever-present glow of social media feeds.
In this always-on environment, how do young professionals take back their lives – offline?
Upwards with purpose
For many young professionals, thriving no longer means climbing the ladder. “Thriving for young professionals in the South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø workspace is strongly tied to learning new competencies and achieving growth, whether that’s through promotion or salary progression,” says Dr Tinashe Chuchu, Senior Lecturer in Marketing in the Wits School of Business Sciences.
However, alongside this desire for upward mobility, he says, is the need for something deeper: purpose and connection.
“Feeling part of something bigger than oneself and wanting to see the team succeed, plays a major role in both performance and wellbeing,” he says.
However, the post-pandemic workplace has accelerated digital dependence, argues Chuchu. Although remote meetings, online collaboration and digital self-presentation may have strengthened skills like adaptability, communication and self-management, digital dependence has also blurred boundaries in ways that young professionals still struggle to navigate.
Then there is social media, the uninvited colleague in every workspace.
Virtual peer pressure
Chuchu says that young professionals spend more time on social media than on any other medium and because the content is peer created, it feels more credible and relatable. However, with credibility comes pressure from highly curated success stories, personal branding narratives and influencer hustle culture, creating the sense that everyone else is thriving, effortlessly.
“Social media has created an alternate universe of artificial success,” says Chuchu. “For early-career professionals, this illusion can lead to pressure and the feeling that they’re not progressing fast enough.”
For many young adults, this pressure is not abstract. It shows up as expectations that creep into everyday choices. Influencers and digital hustle culture are powerful precisely because they appear familiar, relatable and aspirational, explains Chuchu. “They help young professionals dream big but they also feed into comparison and the sense that you’re always behind.”
Aspirational edge
The digital world is also a tool for learning, perspective and staying informed.
Nolitha Garane, 32, is a Wits alumna, lawyer, wife and mother. She says that social media has helped her keep pace with the world in a way that supports her professional life and her sense of thriving. “It keeps me updated with current affairs and I am able to contribute meaningfully to my career,” she says.
For Garane, online content can also offer moments of encouragement when life feels stretched, reinforcing the idea that thriving can look different for different people. “I am sometimes encouraged when I come across a video or a picture that really changes my perspective or educates me,” she adds.
Her view highlights the tension at the heart of digital life for young professionals: the same platforms that inspire and inform can also distract, overwhelm and quietly erode boundaries that are essential for thriving.
Reclaiming life offline
With so much of life unfolding on screens, is a shift back to offline living likely and could that be a way for young professionals to protect their ability to thrive?
Chuchu is sceptical. “I’m not seeing a shift toward digital minimalism,” he says. “If anything, dependency on digital platforms is increasing. The addictive nature of online content makes it difficult for young professionals to step away.”
Still, small acts of resistance are emerging and they are often deeply personal choices that help young professionals reclaim the space that they need to thrive.
For Garane, taking life back offline is tied to presence, faith and simple routines that restore her wellbeing and support her ability to thrive across her different roles. She is honest about the difficulty of doing all this consistently – time is a challenge.
Avoiding burnout
The balancing act between career, wellbeing, relationships and everyday life is familiar to many young professionals, especially those trying to thrive without burning out.
“Research focusing on working smarter rather than harder offers useful guidance for designing early careers that support thriving rather than burnout,” says Chuchu.
Real life communities
For Ndavhe Tshivhase, a Wits BSc Computer Science alumnus, thriving offline means building habits and connections that help him flourish. As a software developer, technology is unavoidable but after hours, he is less online attached, although he dabbles.
“Through social media, I’ve seen many people my age trying out new ways to stay active. More importantly, they have formed new communities,” he says. “I decided to join one of those communities and it was the best decision that I have ever made.” Now he runs three times a week and has an ambitious goal that requires stamina, discipline – and time offline.
Top tips for young professionals to thrive
Ndavhe Tshivhase, a software developer, and Nolitha Garane, a lawyer – both Wits alumni – and Professor Tinashe Chuchu, Senior Lecturer in the Wits School of Business Sciences, have various strategies to help young professionals curb digital overwhelm and to thrive in the real world:
Manage expectations – yours and others
Give yourself permission to delay engagement
Turn off or limit notifications, if only temporarily
Set boundaries – if work demands intensify, avoid social media distractions
Curate your feed for self-protection - unfollow/unfriend toxic topics and people
Reintroduce daily offline habits and activities, like exercise and books
Prioritise in-person interactions
Take an occasional digital detox
Wendy Mothata is Social Media Officer at Wits University.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
This feature is part of a series on what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives. Also read:
Adolescence lasts from just 10 - 24 years old but it is revolutionary and innovative, which is what the world needs now.
It is said that South Africa’s signature music sensation, Amapiano (‘pianos’ in isiZulu), started when someone played piano over gospel tracks. Mirroring its youthful creators, Amapiano is hardly a spin-off, despite its heady mix of genres, but it is fluid, experimental and ultimately, original.
It is a perfect metaphor for contemporary adolescence.
Rather than viewing adolescence (defined as the developmental stage between the ages of 10 and 24 years old) as a problem to be solved, we are invited to see this life stage as a time of ideas, reimagination and revolution, which, the Lancet Commission’sWake-up Call says is “exactly what we need for the survival of our planet”.
Rapid transitions
Professor Nicole de Wet-Billings, Wits’ Senior Director of Academic Affairs and a contributing author to the second Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing, explains that to nurture this brief and transitional phase of life and to realise its potential, “we must listen, invest and stand beside adolescents”.
The time has never been more critical. Currently, 90% of the world’s adolescents live in low- and middle-income countries and in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly half of the population is under 25. By 2050, one in two µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs will be adolescents or young adults. This life phase is often seen as a fleeting stage between childhood and adulthood and is known in developmental parlance as a second window of opportunity, after early childhood. De Wet-Billings explains it as one of life’s most defining and rapid transitions. The brain undergoes significant changes and is highly sensitive to shaping by experience and environmental exposure. Social connections and the development of a sense of identity are critical tasks for adolescents.
Adolescence is short but its consequences last a lifetime. “If support fails here, the costs carry forward,” says De Wet-Billings.
Adolescent angst
For de Wet-Billings, whose doctoral research examined the causes and determinants of adolescent mortality in South Africa, supporting adolescents is both a responsibility and an opportunity. “Teenagers should not be dying at all,” she emphasises. “These deaths speak to failures of environment, support and opportunity.”
Since the publication of the first Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing in 2016, much has changed. The pandemic deepened the mental health crisis, the climate emergency has intensified and social media became both a lifeline and a source of harm.
The second review, published in 2025, emphasises that if no courageous action is taken, the future for adolescents looks bleak. The commissioners project that by the year 2 100, 1.8 billion 10 – 24 year olds will inhabit a world almost three degrees warmer than before industrialisation. Many will face food insecurity, economic instability and conflict.
There is hope, though, and adolescents themselves are leading it.
AfriCAT is a first-of-its-kind adaptive testing tool to guide care for depression and anxiety among adolescents in Africa. Depression and anxiety are leading causes of disability among adolescents, with 20 to 30 percent of South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø adolescents affected. Left untreated, these conditions impact social relationships, disrupt education and increase the likelihood of risky behaviours, self-harm or suicide. As such, early detection and access to treatment can greatly improve outcomes for young people.
A defining feature of AfriCAT is its co-design approach. Adolescents, caregivers, educators and health workers in South Africa and Kenya, including young people with lived experience of depression and anxiety, are shaping the tool’s design and implementation. This participatory ethos reflects the principle of “nothing for us without us”.
Through workshops, adolescents describe how stigma, fear or school stress affect their wellbeing, guiding everything from question tone to interface visuals. “By rooting the design in lived reality, AfriCAT aims to be technically robust and emotionally resonant and a mental health tool that adolescents actually want to use,” says Moffett.
Both Moffett and De Wet-Billings honour the resilience of Africa’s youth. Whether facing mental health challenges, climate anxiety, digital overload or social fragmentation, Africa’s adolescents continue to show creativity and courage.
“The question is whether we will keep pace with their courage,” concludes De Wet-Billings.
Beth Amato is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
This feature is part of a series on what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives. Also read:
Parents can help their toddlers thrive if they encourage play and healthy eating habits.
The years from birth to the age of three are critical to a child’s development and thriving later in life depends on nurturing care during this time. Early experiences mould the brain architecture and provide the foundation for future learning, behaviour and health.
And now I am three …
In the first three years of life, the brain is a sponge, soaking up experiences. From the second a baby is born, a mother’s emotions and the way she responds to her child help shape who the baby will become, including the confidence to learn, vulnerability to illness and ability to relate to others.
Dr Alessandra Prioreschi, a scientist consultant at the Wits Developmental Pathways to Health Research Unit, has developed a free app to support childcare in South Africa. Using insights from mothers in Soweto, the app is designed to provide resources to support mothers in breastfeeding, encourage loving parenting habits and promote child development through play.
By the age of three, the brain has grown to 80% of its adult size and is developing memory, language, thinking and reasoning skills. At this age, a child has around 1 000 trillion neural connections, which are ‘pruned’ as the toddler grows older.
“Even a mother’s smile at the right moment can make a difference to the baby’s development,” says Prioreschi. “So, too, does diet.”
Toddling towards obesity
One of Prioreschi’s focus areas is child obesity and the statistics for South Africa are alarming. According to UNICEF, the percentage of overweight and obese children under five years rose from 13% in 2016 to 23% in 2024. The cultural belief that a fat baby is a healthy baby further drives the prevalence of overweight babies.
“Obesity affects how a child’s organs develop and increases the risk of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes later in life,” says Prioreschi.
Playing for keeps
Playtime for children helps prevent obesity and is as important for their development as exercise is for adults. Children who play more reach their developmental milestones, such as sitting, crawling and standing, quicker. Furthermore, good parenting means healthy eating – clear product labelling that warns of high sugar content would help parents decide which products to buy for their kids.
The exhibition titled From Past to Present: A Journey Through the History of Nutrition and Commercial Food in South Africa was launched at the Adler Museum of Medicine on 15 November 2023 by the SAMRC/Wits Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science, School of Public Health. The exhibition forms part of the Centre’s academic project to provide evidence, methodologies and tools for effective decision-making in health.
Sweet deceits
A new Lancet series on ultra-processed foods co-authored by researchers from the part of the South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø Medical Research Council’s Wits Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science, brings together a wealth of evidence about the harm to our health of ultra-processed foods, designed to be “hyper palatable” to attract more sales. “Unfortunately, children are particularly vulnerable and their taste preferences are developed in early childhood,” says PRICELESS SA Director, Professor Susan Goldstein.
There are many examples of ways to reverse this trend. These include legislative policies to limit sugar intake, such as a higher sugar tax on sugary beverages and front-of-package warning labels to enable people to make informed choices.
“Many of these policies have been mooted in South Africa and globally but the multinational food industries have blocked these policies, putting profit over the health of our children,” adds Goldstein.
Researchers in the Wits Department of Physiology analysed over 600 non-alcoholic beverages from major supermarkets and found that 60% would require warning labels under proposed national regulations for high sugar.
Parents often believe that fruit juices are a healthier option for children but these have the highest sugar content and often escape sugar-related policies due to a loophole that excludes naturally occurring sugars.
“We advocate for stronger labelling regulations that include naturally high sugar,” says physiologist Dr Siphiwe Dlamini, whose latest study analysed 271 breakfast cereals and porridges sold by three major South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø supermarkets. The researchers found that 73.5% of these products would require warning labels due to high levels of sugar, saturated fat, salt and artificial sweeteners.
To paraphrase the proverb: it takes a village to raise a child, but love, playtime and healthy food are essential if they are to thrive.
Nadine Dreyer is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
This feature is part of a series on what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives. Also read:
Investing in antenatal care is crucial for South Africa’s future, but women need support even earlier than in pregnancy.
The health of a child, their ability to learn, resist disease and reach their potential, starts before they are even born. However, extreme inequality in South Africa threatens the health and welfare of future generations. Integrated policy around nutrition support, the promotion of health behaviours, mental health screening and social protection that begins before conception could support pregnant women and break the cycle of poverty.
Inequality affects women more
According to World Bank statistics for 2025, 68% of South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍøs live below the upper-middle-income poverty line. Of these, at least 51% are female and it is women who face higher unemployment, dominate informal work and carry the burden of caregiving.
“This means that women of reproductive age make up a large number of South Africa’s poor,” explains Dr Pooja Nair, an obstetrics and gynaecology specialist and lecturer at Wits.
The consequences of high poverty rates amongst women include delayed or absent antenatal care, poor nutrition, chronic diseases like obesity and hypertension and heightened exposure to gender-based violence and mental-health struggles. Nair says that each of these factors directly affects not only pregnancy outcomes but the child’s long-term development.
Mother and child links
"Nutritional status, stress and chronic diseases are directly related to placental function and development. When these are compromised, there is a rise in preterm births and intrauterine growth restriction, as well as long-term metabolic changes in the child due to epigenetics,” says Nair.
Dr Alessandra Prioreschi, a scientist consultant at the Wits Developmental Pathways for Health Research Unit concurs and explains that women’s poor nutrition, stress or social hardship alter the biological environment in which the baby develops, putting children at a disadvantage before they are even born.
These biological consequences, which span generations, begin pre-conception and continue during pregnancy as the programming of a child's metabolic health and organ function occurs. Research shows that women experiencing food insecurity or chronic stress face higher rates of anaemia, obesity and depression – all of which affect infant growth and development.
Very young mums
The alarm bells to the looming crisis have already begun ringing and teenage girls are among the most vulnerable. Reports show that 150 000 South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø teenage girls were made pregnant between 2022 and 2023. In the Eastern Cape alone, 117 girls aged 10 to 14 gave birth between April and July 2025.
“These early pregnancies perpetuate the same disadvantages that shaped the mother’s life, passing them on to the next generation,” cautions Nair.
Some premature births happen as a result of early pregnancies. When a baby is born prematurely, the costs are enormous and the infant will require specialised neonatal care, long hospital stays and years of developmental and neurological follow-up.
Nair believes that saving future generations requires investment in the education of children, communities and families. “Better education means fewer teenage pregnancies, less gender-based violence and young people who understand their bodies and choices. Health information must reach households, teaching how nutrition, healthy habits and managing chronic illness affect pregnancy and a child’s future,” she adds.
Government putting real resources into primary and regional healthcare, strengthening the health system and ensuring that clinics are staffed, accessible and consistent, are also critical to the success of future generations.
Lifesaving immunisation
Holistic pre-natal and maternal support includes lifesaving vaccination. Vaccines are critical for improving maternal and child health outcomes because they protect both mothers and infants from life-threatening infections during pregnancy and early childhood, according to Professor Michelle Groome, a researcher at the (Wits VIDA) research unit.
“Protection in the first months of life is especially vital because newborns cannot receive many vaccines directly, leaving them vulnerable and without protection from maternal antibodies, which are then transferred to the baby. When vaccines are missed, mothers and babies face a high risk of disease, hospitalisation and even death from preventable infections,” says Groome.
Some of the studies at Wits VIDA have included the pneumococcal conjugate vaccines and rotavirus vaccines in infants, which significantly influenced public immunisation programmes in South Africa and other low- and middle-income countries.
The first randomised controlled trials of inactivated influenza vaccine in women (with and without HIV) demonstrated safety and efficacy in the women and their young infants.
Another study was the first globally on the clinical development of Group B Streptococcus vaccines and respiratory syncytial virus vaccines in pregnant women.
Before 1 000 days
Prioreschi acknowledges that mothers want to do the best for their children but do not always have the means, knowledge or support.
“We need to make it easier for women to be healthy before, during and after pregnancy through access to affordable nutritious food, antenatal care that includes mental health support, safe environments for physical activity and education around breastfeeding and responsive caregiving,” she says.
South Africa already recognises ‘the first 1 000 days’ – the period from conception to a child’s second birthday – as critical. Prioreschi argues that the focus should be extended to pre-conception so that maternal health and nutrition is embedded into social protection, education and labour policies.
The health of mothers and children should not be seen as a cost but as an investment in the foundation of the country’s future wellbeing and productivity.
Marcia Moyana is a freelance writer.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
This feature is part of a series on what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives. Also read:
Welcome to the 20th edition of CURIOS.TY. This milestone reflects how far the magazine has come since its launch 10 years ago.
Over time, CURIOS.TY has grown in format, depth and reach. It has explored themes such as Cities, Gender, Energy, and Disruption, and has helped make Wits’ research accessible to a wide audience.
The growth in readership is encouraging. In the past four years, engagement with CURIOS.TY online has quadrupled to almost 50 000 page views, with 77% of readers exploring multiple pages. We also print 20 000 paper copies that are distributed locally and available to travellers at South Africa’s major airports. Our audience now spans South Africa and includes readers in the USA, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK, China, Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Kenya and France. This international reach speaks to the relevance of our research and the interest in scholarship coming from the Global South.
This 20th edition examines what it means to thrive at various stages of life and in different social and environmental contexts. Our first feature shares research and strategies to thrive, whether you are an expectant mum, parenting toddlers or teens, navigating higher education or your first job, raising a family, or settling into your senior years.
Wits researchers show that thriving begins early. Maternal health, nutrition and commercial determinants shape a child’s long-term development and wellbeing. Supporting mothers and young children is both good public health practice and a foundation for a more caring society.
Thriving also depends on the systems around us. In our second feature, Wits economists and governance experts examine how µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø countries can build more self-reliant and inclusive economies through local innovation, philanthropy and trade. Their work highlights the conditions needed for societies to move from coping to long-term stability.
Environmental research reminds us that human wellbeing is closely linked to the health of the natural world. Studies on soil nutrients, biodiversity and genetic resilience help us understand which species may endure in a changing climate. The nexus of nature, climate change and people reminds us that healthy ecosystems are essential for flourishing, thriving communities.
Cities form another part of this picture. Wits researchers examine how housing, infrastructure, transport and public spaces shape daily life. Their work shows how well-designed cities can support dignity, safety and social connection.
The theme of this edition also prompts reflection on the role of universities and how teachers and students can thrive. Throughout history, universities have survived wars, political transitions and social upheaval because societies rely on places where knowledge is created, questioned and shared openly.
Today, academic freedom and institutional autonomy face pressure in several parts of the world, including attempts to limit what can be taught or researched. Protecting strong, independent universities is essential if future generations are to learn, innovate and contribute to a more resilient society.
The Thrive edition explores the factors that help people and societies flourish in a changing world. Twenty editions on, CURIOS.TY continues to lead the way in sharing research that informs and inspires that progress.
This article first appeared in CURIOS.TY, a research magazine produced by  and the .
Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
CURIOS.TY 20: #Thrive
- CURIOS.TY
What it takes to #Thrive ... The issue explores what it truly means to flourish – across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.
The 20th issue of Wits University’s research magazine, CURIOS.TY, themed #Thrive, is now available online: (See below our guidelines for republishing articles.)
This issue investigates thriving through life, starting even before birth, where antenatal support can shape healthier families and futures. It moves through playful early childhood, revolutionary adolescence, to young adults reclaiming balance in an online world.
We consider how diverse South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families stay connected, why longer µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø lifespans demand stronger brain and gut health research, and why menopause in Africa needs far more global attention.
Thriving also depends on systems: exercise as accessible “medicine”; cross-disciplinary health hubs, and pioneering liver-regeneration science all highlight the power of collaboration. µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø philanthropy is in the spotlight, exploring how problem-first, locally grounded approaches can help Africa flourish despite global pressures.
Zooming out, the issue examines how South Africa can convert natural resources into resilience, fix its water challenges, and value care work in an era of climate strain. Stories on biodiversity, smart cities, air-quality tech, protest, processing memory and emotion through film, and even ancient exercise traditions reinforce one message: thriving is intentional, collective, and urgent.
Highlights:
Before we begin ... (page 8): What is missing and what is required for us to thrive at each stage throughout our lives?
Teenagers to save the world (page 12): Adolescence lasts from just 10 - 24 years old but it is revolutionary and innovative.
50 is the new 60 (page 18): Africa's population is living longer but not necessarily healthier.
The most powerful drug of all (page 20): It's a simple premise, movement is medicine.
From resource to resilience (page 34): South Africa is rich in natural resources, from minerals to sun to wind. How to turn natural wealth into thriving wealth.
Mapping the human story behind science (page 46): PhD student Caitlin Wheeler digs deep beyond the data to connect with patients, students and mentors.
µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø CURIOS.TY
CURIOS.TYis a print and digital magazine that aims to make the research at Wits University accessible to multiple publics. CURIOS.TY is available on the Wits website here:
We consider how diverse South µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø families stay connected, why longer µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø lifespans demand stronger brain and gut health research, and why menopause in Africa needs far more global attention.