Nelson Mandela University: Mandela Uni Marine Engineering collaborates with international partners

Developing students and building research opportunities for staff and students are the result of a successful Erasmus Plus project that Nelson Mandela University’s Marine Engineering Department has been involved in together with five other higher education institutions.

Representing a history of collaboration in the Marine and Maritime sector between Finland and South Africa, Mandela Uni and Finland’s Satakunnan Ammattikorkeakoulu (SAMK) initiated the project in November 2018. The multinational global collaborative project grew from this relationship in the field of Maritime Education and Training.

The other partners that joined the project are the Hochschule Wismar in Germany, Solent University in the United Kingdom, and South Africa’s Cape Peninsula and Durban Universities of Technology.

A recent online symposium with all the partners confirmed that maritime education and training across all six institutions is comparable and covers the academic content required as a foundation for a career as a seafarer.

Future programmes can therefore harness these outcomes to facilitate student and staff exchanges between institutions. Plans for collaboration, and a follow-up project, focussing on student and staff exchange, are being deliberated, said Marine Engineering’s Howard Theunissen and René Pittaway.

​The primary goals were to facilitate the transcontinental cooperative development of innovative Maritime Education and Training knowledge systems and the transfer of good practices as well as continued collaborative development in the higher education sectors of Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Africa. ​