Good News

BULLETIN 21 May 

Good afternoon, here is your Good News:

# South African educator Nadine Smith has won the 2025 EDGE in Tech Athena Award for Early Career Leadership. Honoured at a special ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley, Smith was recognised for her groundbreaking work in transforming Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education, to be more inclusive and accessible. A Coding and Robotics educator at ADvTECH, she was one of only four global recipients and the only African.

# The University of Pretoria has conferred an honorary doctorate in Education on South Africa’s most celebrated and multi-award-winning editorial cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, better known as Zapiro. The university says over the past four decades, Shapiro’s cartoons have held up a compelling, insightful mirror to events taking place in South Africa. Shapiro says it’s pleasing for him to see his cartoons being used in schools and universities as teaching aids:

# Johannesburg has overtaken Cape Town as South Africa’s top start-up hub. According to StartupBlink’s 2025 Global Start-up Ecosystem Index, Johannesburg climbed 17 spots globally to rank 122nd, with a growth rate of over 42-percent, while Cape Town fell to 138th place with 13-percent growth. South Africa remains 52nd globally and leads Africa’s start-up scene. The country’s start-up ecosystem received approximately 8.2-billion-rand in funding in 2024. South Africa’s best industry is edtech, where it ranks 35th worldwide.

# The Western Cape government has awarded the Garden Route District Municipality’s Health Unit a gold certificate. This is for its performance in the technological advancement of environmental health, and for outstanding performance and adherence to municipal health norms and standards. Mayor Andrew Stroebel says the primary aim of municipal health services is to promote health and to ensure a healthy environment for the community:

# And finally: Today is International Tea Day, recognised by the United Nations in 2019 to honour the cultural, economic, and social significance of tea worldwide. Tea is one of the world’s oldest beverages and is the most consumed drink in the world, after water. It is estimated that three-billion cups of tea are consumed globally per day. Sri Lanka, long known for producing some of the world’s finest tea, leads the countries drinking the most tea in the world, followed by Argentina and Turkey.

Stay tuned for more news………….