The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on all of us. South Africa entered a national lockdown on 26 March 2020, and since then we at Stellenbosch University (SU) have worked tirelessly to find innovative ways of dealing with the impact of the pandemic and continuing our work in the new reality of business unusual.

  The internationalisation of higher education has become a formidable force for change in the past decade. Having long outgrown its baby shoes of mere development cooperation, cross-border education today involves high-impact partnerships and collaborative research, often with competitive commercial outputs.

As COVID-19 intensified its grip on the global community from January 2020 onwards, many meetings were cancelled due to international travel restrictions.