New South African SDG Hub website launched

30 November 2021

The South African Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Hub, a national metaplatform hosted by the    University of Pretoria’s Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute, has launched its new website.

‘Our tech team worked around the clock to build a site with significantly more research from both South   African and selected non-South African institutions,’ says Prof Willem Fourie, coordinator of the   metaplatform.

The South African SDG Hub was established in 2017 to provide decision makers with better access to   research relevant for the attainment of the 17 SDGs. It does so by obtaining research metadata from open   access research repositories and redirecting interested users back to these repositories.

The University of Pretoria’s Department of Library Services is one of the Hub’s core partners and it receives  funding from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), through the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

Since its inception, the South African SDG Hub has also developed its own machine learning-powered  SDG classification tool. This means that the more than 350 000 research items on the platform are  automatically classified, when applicable, in terms of one or more of the SDGs.

‘We hope that the new site, with its improved functionality and more user-friendly design will make it easier  for decision makers to access the research they need to achieve the SDGs’, says Prof Fourie.

The new website is available at https://sasdghub.up.ac.za/.