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Education & Training

ACCESS hosts training courses and facilitates training partnerships with various partners for the training of post-graduate students and for short technical courses.

ACCESS Training Courses

ACCESS periodically sets up short courses in a range of topics. We have run courses on climate modelling, statistical modelling and GIS in the past. We have run these courses in various locations in South Africa and in Kenya and Namibia in conjunction with partners including the School of Mathematics and Statistics at St Andrews University and currently with the Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation (SEEC) unit at the University of Cape Town. Watch out notice board for announcements of new courses.

ACCESS Post-Graduate Research

ACCESS has supported over 150 post-graduate research students through its various projects and programmes over its existence. These students were all funded via the NRF in various forms. ACCESS does not offer free-standing bursaries but does so via research grants in the name of ACCESS or one of its partners. A research compendium of research students was compiled in the past and we will shortly be publishing a new compendium of research students who have graduated via ACCESS projects. Watch this space.

Go to HPW

ACCESS Habitable Planet and Schools Outreach

ACCESS Habitable Planet Programme, which has been ongoing for almost 15 years and has graduated over 1500 “Planeteers”. The programme is centered around a series of 10-day experiential workshops held in various locations around the country; and a series of related activities including schools programmes, lecturer training, online courses and other activities. The workshops are aimed at exposing late undergraduates and post-graduates from a variety of backgrounds in order to attract them into earth systems science careers. This is done through a peer learning approach (for content) and through experiential field trips and related activities. We target students from South African Historically Disadvantaged Universities among other institutions and research agencies and aim to increase the number of black and female researchers in this research domain. We also use the opportunity to create a fraternity among students and to teach soft skills in order to increase the confidence and outlook of our students. The key principle is to use optimism and hope as a means of inspiring students to take up the challenges posed in earth systems science by inspiring them with opportunities to make an impact.

A 2023 Monitoring and Evaluation Report on the HPW programme is available here.