The University of Cape Town takes deliberate, sustained action to recruit and support students, staff, and faculty from underrepresented groups, including women, people with disabilities, and historically disadvantaged communities. Promoting diversity and inclusion is central to UCT’s Vision 2030, which commits the university to “unleash human potential to create a fair and just society”. These planned recruitment and development initiatives reflect UCT’s core values of transformation, excellence, and sustainability, ensuring that the university’s academic community increasingly reflects the diversity and dynamism of South Africa and the wider world. 

1. Planned recruitment / pipeline actions for students from historically disadvantaged communities

• 100UP (Schools Development / 100UP programme): 100UP is a UCT pipeline programme that selects academically promising learners from under-resourced Western Cape schools and provides multi-year coaching, residential camps, mentoring and admissions support so learners can compete for places at UCT and other universities. 100UP is a cornerstone of UCT’s Vision-2030 social-responsiveness work; the UCT Trust and Schools Development Unit also describe the programme and its bursary/mentoring activities. The programme empowers grade 11 and 12 learners to meet university admission requirements through a two-year holistic coaching approach. This is a direct, planned recruitment / access programme aimed at widening representation among students.

2. Planned actions for staff and faculty representation (people of colour, women, persons with disabilities)

• Employment Equity & staff-pipeline commitments. UCT’s institutional Employment Equity planning and related guidance are explicit in setting targets and tracking demographic diversity of staff. Faculties track demographic profiles and many units report active measures such as pipeline/professional development programmes, targeted leadership development, and “fast-tracking” of black, women and disabled academics into research and management posts. The UCT staff-access benchmark and related UCT News material describe these planned, institution-level actions (barrier analyses; inclusion training; planned vacancies linked to EE targets).

Through the employment equity portfolio, UCT has slowly yet successfully shifted the demographic profile of its staff to be more representative of South Africa’s diversity.

• Employment Equity Plan and guidance note: The updated Employment Equity Plan describes the goals and steps the university needs to take to further and enliven employment equity. On the other hand, the guidance note is informed by the experience of practitioners and stakeholders in the university and offers in-depth guidance on how the plan can be implemented. For example, the guidance note includes clear recommendations on how to conduct an Employment Equity compliant recruitment process.
• Employment Equity barrier analysis: In addition to and aligned with the Employment Equity Plan, the portfolio conducted a barrier analysis exercise. The exercise invited stakeholders within the university to share examples and experiences of employment equity-related barriers. While the report is still to be launched, the draft highlights clear challenges faced by academic, professional, administrative and other staff members in relation to race, gender and disability, among other factors.
• The Fundamentals of Employment Equity training tool has ensured that the university is trained for appropriately designing and implementing its Employment Equity plan.
• Inclusion of planned vacancies and anticipated attrition in the UCT 2022–2026 Employment Equity Plan helped identify how many vacancies will occur in each unit or cluster. Targets based on the national and provincial targets were set against those vacancies.

Which actions contributed to this benchmark?

In addition to tracking the staff demographic profile, entities at UCT implemented a range of programmes to ensure the inclusion of marginalised staff members. For example:

• Many faculties and departments have developed, implemented or referred black and women staff members to programmes that develop and enable their leadership, academic and research capabilities. For example, some hosted research retreats, others enabled access to funding for womxn or for projects focusing on TDI; another encouraged staff members to pursue their PhDs internationally. This enabled black and women graduate students and young professionals to initiate academic careers.
  
  For example, the Turning the Tide project that began in 2020 is a pipeline project which funds PhD studies and postdoctoral fellowships for black South African scholars. It also funds a 3–5 year contract post at lecturer level for a black South African candidate.
  
  Funding from Mellon Foundation created the possibility of appointing eight (8) full time doctoral writing completion fellowships for Advanced Doctoral students registered in the 2024 academic year at UCT. This particular fellowship is aimed at supporting the work of advanced Black South African graduate scholars in their third/final year of doctoral studies at UCT. These fellows will work as part of the Faculty of Humanities’ Turning The Tide (TTT) academic development initiative. This grant is hosted and administered by HUMA on behalf of the Faculty of Humanities. Turning the Tide is a Faculty of Humanities academic pipeline project that is supported by the Mellon Foundation and is envisaged as a comprehensive plan to build a stronger cohort of academics from historically disadvantaged backgrounds and who demonstrate research interests in knowledge production that helps understand the human condition through new lenses of inquiry. It is aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of previously disadvantaged communities at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels as a result of historic processes of injustice, structural and epistemic violence. The fellowships are reserved for Black South Africans – African, Coloured and Indian. The fellowship places emphasis on interdisciplinary projects in line with the Faculty of Humanities and institutional imperatives to promote interdisciplinarity in curriculum development and research
• Many faculties and departments reported that the committees and decision-making bodies within their entity were already diverse in terms of gender and race, but few included persons with disabilities.
• Many entities hosted workshops, discussions or learning events (sometimes with the faculty or departmental leadership) on TDI or specific topics including race, gender, sexuality or disability.
• Faculty / leadership development for women. UCT Graduate School of Business and wider UCT run women-focused leadership programmes and events (for example the GSB’s “Developing Women in Leadership” executive programme and the long-running Women in Business conference), which are deliberate interventions to support women’s progression into leadership roles and to build pipelines for senior appointments.

3. Planned actions & services for persons with disabilities (recruitment, retention, accommodation)

• Disability Services / Office for Inclusivity & Change (OIC): UCT maintains a Disability Service / Office for Inclusivity & Change portfolio that coordinates accommodation, access and inclusion work. UCT’s disability accounts and the institutional OIC fact sheets describe accelerated disability support, the Disability Service social channels and efforts to mainstream accessibility and accommodations for students and staff. Scholarly reviews of disability inclusion at UCT (2024) also cite the Disability Services office as the anchor for inclusion work. These are planned, institutional arrangements for recruiting, accommodating and supporting students and staff with disabilities.

4. How UCT implements these plans

• Pipeline programmes (e.g., 100UP, Saturday schools, residential camps) that actively prepare applicants from under-resourced schools
• Contextual admissions and outreach (targeted recruitment, admissions support and bridging programmes) to translate pipeline gains into enrolments
• Employment Equity planning & targets used to guide hiring, plus faculty-level development & mentoring programmes to accelerate the careers of black, women and disabled staff
• Dedicated support services (Disability Services, Office for Inclusivity & Change, women’s leadership courses, academic development units) to retain and develop recruited staff and students from under-represented groups