Two years ago Josephine Loudon and Flip Collot d’Escury from the Netherlands visited the Southern African Wildlife College (SAWC) as volunteers. Today this has blossomed into an association with Rotterdam’s Erasmus University College.
This association will now be run as a pilot aimed at establishing relationships with students from the North and South, namely students currently studying at Erasmus University College in the Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty and past students of the SAWC’s Natural Resource Management Advanced Certificate in Transfrontier Conservation Management.
“Essentially the idea, which was Josephine and Flip’s brainchild, is to expose both sets of students to each other’s management, leadership and research skills under this inter-cultural leadership programme. The students will be grouped together and tasked with a relevant conservation management challenge. Jointly they will then have to approach the challenge with their different skills set and in the process learn from one another,” said the College CEO, Theresa Sowry.
Fifteen students in total will be part of the pilot programme, ten students from the Netherlands and five from southern Africa, making up five project teams. The aim being to create an empowering and enabling environment in which the students can design projects, collect data, learn from one another, and present suggested solutions to the SAWC’s applied learning unit, headed by Prof. Alan Gardiner, for consideration and evaluation.
A big thank you must also be extended to John Loudon, a Peace Parks Foundation board member, for giving his daughter Josephine the opportunity to experience the SAWC first hand. Her and Flip’s experiences at the College have essentially led to this exciting institutional exchange programme.
Anyone interested in supporting this exciting pilot programme of future programmes such as this is to please email jpoultney@sawc.org.za for further details.
