South Africa’s 2023 National Science Week (NSW) was successfully launched over the weekend, the launch being hosted by the University of Venda, in the Limpopo province. The NSW was first held in 2000 and is coordinated by the National Research Foundation’s South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (NRF-SAASTA).

“This year, NRF-SAASTA, a unit of the National Research Foundation, will continue to award grants to various organisations – public, private and non-governmental – that will carry out activities to popularise science across South Africa, and promote science literacy,” highlighted Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister Dr Blade Nzimande in his keynote address at the lunch. “I, therefore, want to make a call to all our learners that no one should be left out of the solution-driven national discourse that speaks to the value of science in our lives and for our future.”

The NSW will actually run from July 31 to August 5 and is designed to display science to schoolchildren and encourage them to study, and pursue careers in, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Some 1 000 children attended the launch. NSW activities will be held all across the country.

“The NSW should serve as a reminder to schools to encourage learners to take up mathematics and science,” he affirmed. “Research indicates that STEM [and innovation] Olympiads and fairs are useful in developing problem-solving, creative, computational, communication, and innovation skills, which are among those that are important for the future of work. It is also counterproductive to discourage learners from choosing mathematics, as some school principals are doing, thinking that it is the best way for their schools to produce better results by avoiding the purported difficult mathematics altogether.”

He urged schools to make the 2023 NSW a turning point in their treatment of STEM subjects. He called on all schools to have at least one fun science experiment in every class on every day of the NSW. He noted that many such experiments could be found on the Internet.