As the President of HEFMA, I’ve been very privileged to be leading a benchmarking process with institutions of higher learning across our country and institutions from other continents. Through this association several university staff have benefitted from the sharing of knowledge and expertise made easily available through various platforms and engagements HEFMA provides.
For the first time, HEFMA hosted a strategic session to plan all the activities for the upcoming year and address institutional matters as well as set goals and objectives to ensure a smooth operation of the HEFMA association. During the strategic session, discussions were held around proposed various changes and assistance requested through the Advisory committee endorsed by IF members to address the following:
- By Maureen Malaka
I have been privileged to have been a member of HEFMA for the past 22 years and served on the HEFMA executive since 2017. While I need to thank the team that worked so hard during the past few years, I would also like to acknowledge the founding members – Mr Stan Dennis, Ferdi Pieterse and Robert Quinn who transformed TiMCON into HEFMA in Cape Town 2001
There have been many highlights that was one being the Break away in 2018 in Stellenbosch. The second the Online Conference which had to be hastily arranged in Stellenbosch in 2021 due to the COVID pandemic. Finally, the next physical conference in 2022 which Stellenbosch University could not host in 2020.
To promote Initially this was quite an adjustment and frustrating for many members and our meetings with international which partner took place in the early hours of the morning due to time zones across the world.
We had a special conference in Namibia in 2018 and we were able to set up the special AUDE Bursary Sumer School scheme in which AUDE sponsored one aspiring Director of Estates to this training program. We were immensely proud that Maureen of UFS and Avi of UCT were the first recipients of this bursary see video of their visit ll and the Insourcing challenges. We were able to whether these storms and transition into online both locally and with our international partners to increase contact with members with the regional visits.
I had the great honour to visit TEFMA in Australia with Maureen and Israel who were able to join me at the TEFMA Conference in September 2022. View presentation
I was able to visit several Universities in Australia from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne with several lessons learned. In my humble opinion the Estates and Facilities departments in the Higher Education sector in South African are equal to these institution despite our resources challenges.
To promote Initially this was quite an adjustment and frustrating for many members and our meetings with international which partner took place in the early hours of the morning due to time zones across the world.
In my time in office, we were able to formalise many relationships with SAFMA, SAAMA, Green Building Council of South Africa as these are key stakeholder in the Facilities management and the Built Environment in southern Africa, I would like to thank them for their participation and contributions.
