MPHO MOLOELE
Professor Azwihangwisi Mavhandu-Mudzusi’s passion for education and mentoring has been the vanguard in enabling her students to complete their master’s and PhD studies in record time.
Steadfast in placing value in collaborative networks to help her students produce impactful research, Mavhandu-Mudzusi has graduated 29 master’s and 21 PhD candidates.
Unisa’s Mavhandu-Mudzusi, Director in the School of Social Sciences, College of Human Sciences, initiated the Postdoctoral Incubation Programme in 2020 to ensure that staff who have recently received their PhD are mentored in research, grants applications and postgraduate student support.
Now extended to other Unisa colleges, the support programme has borne fruit as evidenced by the increase in National Research Foundation rated researchers, successful grant applications, as well as the increase in research outputs.
"The Postdoctoral Incubation Programme contributes to bringing more research talent into the mainstream and growing the country’s science cohort," says Mavhandu-Mudzusi.
She instils a respect for research excellence in her students and identifies exceptional talent, nurturing it, particularly among her black female students, acting as a mentor and encouraging them to continue their studies to PhD level and beyond.
Research that supports the reduction of stigma and discrimination
A trailblazing scholar herself, with a C2 NRF rating, Mavhandu-Mudzusi’s research focuses on HIV/Aids management and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersexual (LGBTQI+) community. She has published 93 peer-reviewed articles, seven book chapters and three books.
Her journal articles are cited by respected researchers globally. Moreover, her work has attracted collaborators who are dealing with HIV and LGBTQI+ research nationally, internationally and in SADC countries such as Zimbabwe, where gender or sexual non-conformance is frowned upon and even considered a criminal offence.
Mavhandu-Mudzusi’s leadership and expertise in this field have assisted in the success of such collaborative projects, with several publications and recommendations advocating for LGBTQI+ individuals to access antiretroviral treatment and pre-exposure prophylaxis.
Her research supports the reduction of stigma and discrimination of LGBTQI+ individuals and people living with HIV. Mavhandu-Mudzusi’s research, in effect, engages with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) which calls for providing information on their status to people living with HIV to achieve viral suppression through antiretroviral therapy.
In a recognition for high-quality published research and societal impact, Mavhandu-Mudzusi received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research at the 2024 Unisa Research and Innovation Awards. This award is regarded as the most prestigious award for research and innovation at Unisa.
Mavhandu-Mudzusi co-hosts an annual symposium with youth, community members, religious and traditional leaders as a way of advocating for LGBTQI+ persons in the form of deconstructing taboo. "This is because, in some rural areas, being gender non-confirming or not falling in any binary of being a male or female, is considered a bad omen or taboo," she says.
She also facilitates workshops for educators in rural schools, empowering them to offer contextually relevant HIV information using the language used by the learners and addressing learners’ day-to-day circumstances that predispose them to risky sexual practices. Moreover, she uses her external grants to support most of the workshops.
A leader of an engaged scholarship project on Enhancing HIV prevention among learners in Limpopo, Mavhandu-Mudzusi has been equipping Life Orientation educators with appropriate skills to enable them to contextually and relevantly teach sexual education to learners in rural farm schools in the Musina Municipality.
The implementation of the project on HIV prevention has contributed to reducing the pregnancy rate at one of the farm schools with only 183 learners (including grade zero up to grade 9) from 50 to one to no pregnancy annually since 2014.