The University of Cape Town (UCT) actively advances the Sustainable Development Goals through international research partnerships, multi-university networks, funded global platforms and transdisciplinary living-labs. Across faculties and research institutes UCT both convenes comparative events and co-produces evidence with overseas partners to test, scale and share practical solutions (policy, technical and governance) that help shape international best practice on SDG delivery. Below are six examples from across the university demonstrating this contribution.

1. African Climate & Development Initiative — ARUA Centre of Excellence (regional + international comparative research)

ACDI/UCT leads the ARUA Centre of Excellence in Climate and Development, a hub that coordinates comparative research and training with partner universities across Africa to inform climate-resilient development policy.
The ARUA Centre of Excellence model explicitly anchors comparative research across regions to “contribute to achieving sustainable development goals.”

The African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) at the University of Cape Town is the lead organisation for a regionally distributed ARUA Centre of Excellence that will undertake research, training and influencing to substantially contribute to achieving sustainable development goals in the face of climate change. The initial ARUA CoE hub partners are UCT (CoE Secretariat and Southern African regional hub), University of Ghana (West African regional hub) and University of Nairobi (East African regional hub)

2. UCT International SDG Summit (African Centre for Cities) — convening global networks to accelerate SDG practice

The African Centre for Cities (UCT) convened the UCT SDG Summit (international SDG Summit for Africa), bringing academic networks and international partners together to design collaborations aimed at accelerating SDG implementation across African cities. The summit aimed to bring together leading thinkers and influencers … to work on developing innovative collaborations that will contribute to accelerating the pace and scale of achieving the SDGs in Africa.

3. Future Water Institute — international living lab with University of Copenhagen (applied SDG-relevant research)

UCT’s Future Water Institute ran a six-year living-lab project in Mitchells Plain in partnership with the University of Copenhagen, testing water-sensitive interventions and generating transferable lessons for urban water resilience, which concludes in 2025.

The project was designed as an international research partnership to trial, evaluate and export lessons on water security and sanitation — central to SDG 6.

4. Wellcome Discovery Research Platform (CIDRI-Africa) — globally networked platform to strengthen locally-led health research

CIDRI-Africa at UCT was selected by Wellcome to host the Discovery Research Platform for Infection, a multi-year, well-funded platform intended to bring together researchers and collaborators worldwide to address infection and its links to non-communicable disease. Saturday 16th March 2024 saw the launch of the Discovery Research Platform for Infection at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at UCT, one of eight new Wellcome-funded Discovery Research Platforms, and the only one outside the United Kingdom. The new Discovery Research Platform for Infection is hosted by CIDRI-Africa and will take on gaps in our knowledge that hold back understanding of the interaction between infection and non-communicable diseases, and strengthen capacity to enable locally led, high-quality research studies to reduce infection, especially HIV-1 and tuberculosis.

Wellcome’s Platform funding and the aim to bring together researchers, teams and collaborators positions UCT as a global node for research that informs health-related SDG practice and capacity building.

5. Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance — formal partnership with the United Nations System (capacity, policy research & comparative governance)

UCT’s Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance signed a five-year partnership with the UN System Staff College (UNSSC) for collaborative research, teaching and policy engagement. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) will guide cooperation between the institutions over the next five years.

Under the terms of the MOU, the two institutions will leverage each other’s strengths to work collaboratively in selected areas of research, pedagogy, dialogue, research forums, and the sharing of facilities and other resources.

Some of the planned joint activities include facilitating the sharing of information and knowledge to enhance capacity, the development of joint executive education and academic courses in areas of common interest. This will also include the development of joint publications and joint human capital development initiatives — directly supporting SDG implementation through internationally aligned capacity building and policy research.

6. Centre for Infectious Disease / public-health collaborations — multi-institutional international networks and programmatic exports

UCT’s public-health research units (e.g., Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology & Research / related centres) have long partnered with international research networks and institutions — for example, collaborative work with ICAP at Columbia University, IeDEA networks and international trial consortia — producing tools, systems and evidence used across countries. These cross-institutional collaborations produced technical tools (e.g., national HIV/TB monitoring systems), multi-country epidemiological evidence and shared capacity that directly inform SDG 3 (health) policies and practices across contexts.

7. DataFirst collaboration with African institutions

Accelerated Data Programme with African National Statistical Offices

DataFirst at UCT works with national statistics offices in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and the United Republic of Tanzania, as part of an “Accelerated Data Programme.” DataFirst Technical Paper 22 outlines how many African NSOs lack resources for proper microdata curation, and how DataFirst supports them via capacity building, metadata standards, and policy engagement. This demonstrates that DataFirst is not just archiving South African data, but actively building data curation capacity in other African countries, thereby enabling more rigorous socio-economic research across Africa.

8. Astronomy / data-intensive research collaborations involving UCT (IDIA, Ilifu)

UCT’s data-intensive astronomy work builds on data infrastructure, cloud computing, and capacity for “big data” in astronomy. Here are key examples of UCT's international / inter-institutional astronomy collaborations.

  • IDIA (Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy)
    • IDIA is a formal consortium of three South African universities: UCT, University of the Western Cape (UWC), and University of Pretoria (UP) with the mission to build … capacity and expertise in data intensive research … to enable global leadership on MeerKAT … and SKA pathfinder telescopes.
    • This institutional collaboration enables shared infrastructure, capacity building, and the training of data scientists / astronomers, making UCT a key node in the African astronomy “big data” ecosystem.
  • Ilifu computing facility
    • The Ilifu data-intensive facility is a cloud infrastructure supporting astronomy and bioinformatics. Ilifu’s partners include UCT, UWC, Sol Plaatje University, University of Stellenbosch, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).
    • Ilifu explicitly supports “globally distributed teams of researchers … to access, process and visualise … large data sets … from MeerKAT and other SKA precursor / pathfinder projects.”
    • In its strategic science programme for astronomy, Ilifu works with “the International Virtual Observatory … on metadata standards and database systems for multi-wavelength astronomy analyses.”
    • This shows UCT / Ilifu actively engaging with the international astronomy community on data standards and cloud-based research tools.
  • International partnerships on data delivery & SKA
    • Through IDIA, UCT researchers collaborate internationally in the SKA Science Data Processor (SDP) programme. For example, IDIA works with DELIV collaborators in Canada (Canadian Astronomy Data Centre), the Oxford e-Research Centre (UK), ASTRON (Netherlands), and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (Spain) on data access, transfer, and pipeline development.
    • These collaborations are central to designing the distributed, federated architecture of SKA data centers, and to building software / infrastructure that supports global science delivery.
  • IDIA Visualisation Lab (iDaVIE)
    • UCT / IDIA’s Visualisation Lab (VisLab) has developed iDaVIE, a VR (virtual reality) software suite to visualise large, multidimensional radio-astronomy data cubes.
    • This tool is used for both scientific analysis and training; the VisLab is located at UCT (RW James building) and also uses the Iziko Planetarium’s dome for immersive data visualization.
    • Such visual-analytic platforms enable international collaboration: researchers anywhere can explore and manipulate large datasets in interactive, cloud-oriented environments.
  • Workflow development & reproducible data pipelines (Stimela2)
    • UCT/IDIA researchers are involved in developing Stimela 2, a framework for scalable, reproducible workflows for radio-astronomy data reduction, designed for cloud or container orchestration.
    • This workflow tool supports collaboration by enabling scientists across different institutions (and countries) to share, run, and reproduce data reduction recipes on large radio datasets (e.g., MeerKAT), thereby contributing to more robust international science.

DataFirst: UCT’s DataFirst is not just a local archive but a pan-African data-service, working with multiple national statistical offices (NSOs) and research institutions in Africa. Its technical work (curating government microdata, training, data policy) strengthens data research capacity across the continent.

Astronomy / data-intensive research: Through IDIA and Ilifu, UCT plays a central role in building cloud-based infrastructure, international partnerships, and tools for astronomers working with major radio-survey data (MeerKAT, SKA). These collaborations are international in scope (Europe, global SKA partners) and regional (other South African universities), and they support cutting-edge data science, visualization, and reproducible workflows.

Summary

UCT demonstrates institutional scale and breadth in generating comparative, internationally-grounded evidence and practice for the SDGs. Evidence spans (a) pan-African research centres (ACDI/ARUA CoE), (b) global convenings that aggregate best practice (UCT SDG Summit / ACC), (c) transnational applied living labs (Future Water / University of Copenhagen), (d) large international research platforms (Wellcome CIDRI-Africa), (e) UN system partnerships for governance capacity (Nelson Mandela School / UNSSC), (f) long-standing global health research networks (CIDER + international consortia), (g) DataFirst, and (h) IDIA and Ilifu. Collectively these demonstrate UCT’s role in reviewing comparative approaches and helping to develop and spread international best practice on tackling the SDGs.