Impact Assessment Report - Evaluation of the UMP Strategic Plan 2015 - 2022

Evaluation study findings on impact of University of Mpumalanga’s 2015-2022 strategic plan

• Based on the annual performance indicators, the Governance, Strategic Leadership and Management goals and objectives were achieved year on year, with scores of 100% in 5 out of the 6 years that were assessed. In the other year, 91% of defined activities were achieved under this strategic focus.
• The University saw rapid growth on all academic indicators. The number of academic programmes (qualifications) on offer increased from 3 in 2014, 9 in 2016, to 48 in 2022. The number of students enrolled from 169 in 2014, 1262 in 2016 to 7100 in 2022 and the number of students graduating from 203 in 2015 to 1113 graduates in 2021.
• The number of academic staff also increased from 13, 3(23%) of whom had PhD qualification in 2014 to 160 of whom 73 (48%) were PhD holders in 2021. The University compares favourably with other universities in terms of the percentage of staff with PhD, it is 2% points from achieving the 50% target as defined in the Medium Strategic Framework (2015 – 2019) by Government.
• The University is competitive in terms of number of publications per academic staff, averaging 0.62 against an average target of 0.55 units over the 7 years.
• The University was able to complete its academic year in 2020 and 2021 despite the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak and the associated lock downs. The ICT infrastructure of the University enabled the University to have few interruptions during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak.
• The University doing extremely well on the ENACTUS competitions, a national community innovation programme, winning close to 20 trophies between 2017 and 2021 among other achievements.
• The University of Mpumalanga boasts some of the most iconic infrastructure of a university in the country.
• The University had clean audits over the 6 years period, 2016 to 2021