NRF Strategic Agreements with France

The NRF has concluded two prominent industry and mobility agreements with French entities at the Embassy of France yesterday on the occasion of the visit of the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Madame Catherine Colonna.

The Cross Mobility Programme with Campus France serves as an expansion of the bilateral France-South Africa PROTEA Programme, celebrating its 25^th anniversary during the France-South Africa Higher Education and Research Week, held from 27 June to 02 July 2022. The expansion of the programme into the new PROTEA Cross Mobility Programme (CMP), with bespoke Calls for Proposals, will support 50 South African Master’s and PhD students per annum for reciprocal exchanges for long-term institutional research partnerships.

The PROTEA CMP forms part of the NRF’s Global Knowledge Partnerships (GKP) Framework for early career researchers as an integral component of the NRF’s strategic goal to create an internationally competitive, transformed and representative researcher cohort. For the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the PROTEA CMP forms part of the cross-mobility programme with the African Continent which was conceptualised following the Africa-France Summit in Montpellier on 08 October 2021.

The first-of-its-kind partnership with Schneider Electrics aims to build training, research and innovation capacity within South African universities for practical training in the field of energy generation and sustainability. A large number of training and innovation development opportunities will be provided to students across South Africa through this partnership. The partnership also seeks to identify opportunities for research in the field of energy and enhance curriculum development by Universities in accordance with industry requirements.

The partnerships between the NRF and Schneider Electrics will play a key role in providing direction and facilitating collaboration between industry and academia in order to increase socio-economic impact and the development of critical human capacity, aligned with the NRF’s Industry Partnership Strategy.