Social cohesion advocate honoured

AN ADVOCATE for social cohesion, Rajendran Govender, has been awarded a fellowship to conduct research in India on indigenous knowledge systems and traditional knowledge.

Govender was awarded an IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) visiting

fellowship by the Research and Information System (RIS) for Developing Countries. He will be based in New Delhi for six months, from September.

The IBSA Visiting Fellowship Programme was instituted at the RIS, with the support of the Ministry of External Affairs, government of India.

The programme aims to promote academic exchange of scholars in the field of economics and social sciences to strengthen research collaboration among India, Brazil and South Africa in the spirit of south-south co-operation.

“This is such an honour. I had applied for this before Covid but it was put on hold.

“The indigenous knowledge system looks at traditional knowledge and cultures, when it comes to traditional medicine, games, farming, etc.

“When you look at community practices, for example the use of turmeric and moringa powder, the Western world has now taken it and capitalised on it without giving credit to the origins of it,” he said.

Govender, of Malvern, said he was passionate about social cohesion and indigenous cultures.

“My focus would be on the indigenous knowledge system. There’s different policies for different countries. The Western world looks down upon Africa because they feel that Africans are primitive and have traditional medicine. They don’t recognise it.

“My research is going to dispel their myths and I want to advocate for a uniform policy across the board when it comes to indigenous knowledge.

“So they mustn’t look at Africa differently from China or India, and so on. There must be one international policy governing indigenous knowledge systems,” said Govender.

He said the focus of the work programme of the RIS was to promote south-south co-operation and collaborate with developing countries in multilateral negotiations in various forums.