Universities: ivory towers?
- By Vivienne Rowland
Minister in the Presidency responsible for National Planning, Trevor Manuel, says universities play a critical role in societal development and the gathering of data to understand societal trends and government's response to it.
Manuel delivered the inaugural ISIbalo Annual Lecture on Tuesday, 22 October 2013, hosted by the Demography and Population Studies Programme at Wits.
“Today we have a broader understanding of demography, yet we still know so little. We know too little about the rural to urban migration, we know too little about what young people do when they leave school after matric, we know too little about the elderly, we know precious little about why marriage rates have fallen so rapidly in the last 20 years,” says Manuel.
He says demography and statistics are not only about having good sets of numbers.
“We need to unpack the statistics to give abroad narrative that is consistent of the indicators. We need to understand the numbers to understand how migration works and why it changes over time. We need to answer the policy questions, such as how do we cope with rising numbers of urban population, what do we do about children living without adult parents, and so forth. Universities play critical roles in all of these tasks. They provide the methodologies for accurate statistics, they help analyse the data, they build tools to allow society to understand the data and they help answer difficult questions about what society should do about a particular trend.”
The lecture series was launched as part of Demography Week, which celebrated the 10 year anniversary of Demography and Populations Studies at Wits, on the eve of the centenary celebration of Statistics South Africa next year. The theme of the week is A decade of commitment to demography and population health teaching and research.
The ISIbalo Annual Lecture Series is a collaborative initiative between Statistics South Africa and the Demography and Populations Studies Programme at Wits for intellectual interaction on the use of socio-economic data for development planning.
The lecture programme included introductory remarks by Professor Stephen Tollman, Head of the Health and Population Division in the Wits School of Public Health; the Statistician General, Mr Pali Lehohla explaining the ISIbalo concept and initiatives; the lecture by Minister Manuel titled Evidence in national development efforts with specific reference to the role of ivory towers; a question and answer session; and responding remarks by Lehola, Manuel and Professor Adam Habib, Wits Vice-Chancellor and Principal.