Our institutional goals and the SDGs

UP’s approach to strategic planning is framed by the approved 15-year long-term strategy (UP 2025), which serves as a blueprint for the University’s role as a national asset, and guides its responses to national, regional, continental, and global challenges and priorities. The implementation of UP 2025 is enabled through a nested approach, with three sequential five-year planning horizons to guide and support the attainment of set aspirations. Within each five-year horizon, annual performance plans identify the more detailed and specific actions needed to realise the overall goals.

Our institutional goals thus play a critical role in setting direction and defining how we give expression to our purpose and intent to develop people and create the requisite knowledge and solutions that are relevant, of high quality, and impactful as we seek to make a difference locally and globally. Articulating our aspirations through the goals allows the entire University community to align its collective efforts towards the achievement of these goals.

Within our nested strategic planning approach, we have continued to refine and nuance the goals, as we take our complex and evolving landscape, along with our institutional maturation, into account. For the five-year period 2017 to 2021, the goals were to: • enhance student access and successful learning; • foster and sustain a transformed, inclusive and equitable University community; • optimise resources and institutional sustainability; • strengthen the University’s research and international profile; and • strengthen the University’s social responsiveness and impact on society. The goals play an anchoring role and demonstrate congruence with the intents of the South African National Development Plan (NDP), the African Union’s Agenda 2063, and the UN’s SDGs.

Through this mapping, we see the interconnected nature of the University and society, and the societal issues to which we respond. The mapping is at the highest level of institutional strategy, showing how sustainable development is hardwired into what we do and what we seek to achieve. It also enables the design of step-change activities that achieve our purpose and contribute to accelerating achievement of the SDGs in a way that is embedded into our core strategy.

Each goal maps to multiple SDGs, and three of the SDGs cut across all of the goals. This reflects the complexity of both our institutional goals and the SDGs themselves. Within this complexity, we are able to prioritise the SDGs to which we contribute, either wholly or in part. We also create the space and structure for the University community at the frontline to design step-change activities to achieve both institutional and global goals, leveraging their areas of strength and capability.