At the University of the Western Cape [UWC], USSAS supports forty or fifty students in undergraduate programs of all sorts. Each USSAS bursary recipient is required to go through AIDS Awareness and Prevention training run by Dr. Tania Vergnani. These students then work on campus in the anti-AIDS campaign that has become a permanent part of the UWC program. IN addition, USSAS, in cooperation with Dr. Vergnani and the Director of Admissions, Mr. Rensche Bell, has launched a new program to recruit secondary school graduates who are AIDS-impacted, either by being themselves HIV positive, or through having lost family to the disease. These students will come to UWC as undergraduates, where they will meet together as a mutual support group to help them overcome the terrible depression and discouragement suffered by students who discover that they are HIV positive, or whose families are struck by AIDS.

At the Durban Institute of Technology, USSAS works with Dr. Frida Rundell, who heads up a Social Work Program there awarding B. Technikon and M. Technikon degrees to students being prepared to address the needs of AIDS-impacted South Africans. While studying, the twenty students supported by USSAS do fieldwork at Drop-in Clinics, Shelters for street children, facilities for children arrested and awaiting trial, and Testing Sites. These students are among only a handful in all of South Africa who are being professionally trained to meet the needs of the hundreds of thousands of children who are being orphaned by AIDS. All of the Social Work students being supported by USSAS are Black.

At the Medical University of South Africa [MEDUNSA], USSAS supports ten Black medical students to who are preparing to become doctors serving the Black population of South Africa. MEDUNSA is one of only South African medical schools that focus on training students from the Black majority. The White South African community has a long tradition of outstanding medical training and cutting edge experimentation, but more and more, the White students who graduate from South Africa’s medical schools emigrate to the United States, Europe, or Australia, so that their expertise is lost to the South African population.

In addition to UWC, MEDUNSA, and the Durban Institute of Technology, USSAS has supported students at a number of other South African institutions of higher education. These include:

The University of Durban-Westville, the university created during the apartheid era for Indian students, but now serving both African and Indian students in roughly equal numbers.

The Qwa-Qwa campus of the University of the North, a rural campus in the Orange Free State serving equal numbers of Zulu-speaking and Sotho-speaking African students.

Cape Technikon, an historically white technikon in Cape Town now headed by an African political scientists, Marcus Baluntulo.

UNISA, the enormous distance-learning university based in Pretoria that has over the years provided higher education to hundreds of thousands of Black South Africans, including most notably Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The University of Natal, where we offer a doctoral fellowship in memory of Prem Singh, the political scientist at the University of Durban-Westville who for so many years selected our scholarship recipients and looked after them.

And finally, Fort Hare University, the alma mater of Nelson Mandela, where back in 1990, at the very start of USSAS, we supported one African student.