Other Activities
Educational initiatives, training programmes, and capacity building activities that extend the impact of our research beyond academic publications.
Education and Training Activities
Building marine measurement, monitoring, and modelling capacity in Africa to better serve the needs of its people through educational initiatives
Educational Initiatives
Primary school educational modules focused on marine science, developed in partnership with education professionals to augment the South African curriculum and inspire the next generation of marine scientists.
Winter Schools
Intensive training programme for early-career researchers, led by OBVI’s SUBSEA project, focused on important topics in Marine Biogeochemistry.
Modelling Workshops
Hands-on workshops focused on numerical ocean modelling, featuring MOM6-COBALT configurations and ecosystem models, designed to build modelling capacity at African institutions.
Educational Initiatives
The West African Margin team are partnering with an education professional to produce teaching modules that can be integrated into the South African school curriculum. These will focus on the importance of the ocean regions surrounding Africa for food security, climate regulation, and planetary health.
For science to have true impact, it must be effectively communicated to non-academic constituencies – one of the largest such constituencies are school children, the researchers of tomorrow. In WAM, we are motivated to prioritise school children because they are the generation that will inherit the oceans that we are currently working to understand and to protect. In addition, children tend to be more open-minded than adults, and far more likely to engage with issues of the environment and climate change. Finally, they are the leaders of the future – they should have a say in what that future looks like.
The modules we develop will be aimed at primary school children and will include written and video content designed to make ocean science accessible and engaging for young learners across Africa and beyond.
Winter School
The Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute (OBVI) SUBSEA project, with contributions from WAM, hosted the first winter school for OBVI post-docs and students at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa from November 30 – December 12, 2025. This workshop focussed on marine primary production and aimed to familiarise participants with concepts, data, and models specific to ocean productivity. Numerous WAM post-docs and students attended the workshop, and WAM investigators contributed to the lecturing and hands-on training.
The modules developed were aimed at primary school children and included written and video content designed to make ocean science accessible and engaging for young learners across Africa and beyond.
Modelling Workshops
The MOM6 model configurations will be developed at Princeton, with modelling skill subsequently transferred to UCT through investigator and student exchanges, modelling workshops hosted in Cape Town, likely in 2027 and 2028, and the physical transfer of various configurations of the model.
This project is supported by
Schmidt Sciences LLC
This project is part of
The Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute (OBVI)