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Her academic performance, leadership, reconciliatory skills and entrepreneurship have earned Comfort Ndala (22) a Mandela Rhodes scholarship. This will enable her to undertake two years of postgraduate studies at a local university, while working at the CSIR.
“I feel so privileged to be one of the 30 recipients of this scholarship. On top of that, we’ve been told that we would get to meet Madiba!” enthuses Ndala. As a single child, she was raised by a motivating, supportive mother who is a teacher. Ndala grew up in Vezubuhle, a rural village near KwaMhlanga in Mpumalanga.
While she was studying operations management at the Tshwane University of Technology, Ndala joined the CSIR’s logistics and quantitative methods research group in 2008 as an in-service trainee. “With the scholarship, I want to study towards a postgraduate degree in management sciences,” she says.
Ndala has been involved in a number of research projects as part of a team from CSIR Built Environment. Such initiatives include a logistics study on improving the utilisation of business best practices in the military sector; a research study focusing on supply chain of the sugar industry; and investigating the challenges faced at municipality and district levels in terms of waste service provision.
“One of the work projects I enjoy most is a humanitarian logistics study for Heartbeat, a non-profit organisation that aims to empower orphaned and vulnerable children to reach their full potential through quality service provision, development and capacity building. The interaction with the children, most of whom are HIV/Aids orphans, is really special. We are conducting business process reengineering studies to enhance the logistics processes of Heartbeat.”
“In another project, we are investigating gaps and linkages in developmental logistics. We look at past and current logistics developments studies of rural and townships areas to identify future areas of research,” Ndala comments.
She would like to do more research on green operations and manufacturing and their benefits to the community and the environment. “We need to make people aware how they can contribute to protecting the environment in everyday activities,” she explains.
Ndala feels passionate about reaching out to people. She wants to provide academic and social mentoring to small groups of students at university level and has already contacted one institution regarding such an initiative.
To destress after work, Ndala plays tennis, jogs and sings in a church choir.
News contributed by: Hilda Van Rooyen, CSIR Strategic Communication and Stakeholder Relations
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