Deputy Minister Nomalungelo Gina: Portfolio Committee engagement on Science, Technology and Innovation

Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee: Hon. Sherley Makhubela

Honourable Members of this Portfolio Committee

DSTI Director-General Dr Mlungisi Cele and his team

Parliament support staff

Thank you for this opportunity to present to the Portfolio Committee. We always value the opportunity to appear before the Portfolio Committee and give a detailed account of what we are doing as a department to advance science, technology, and innovation.

Firstly, we are presenting the 2026/2027 Annual Performance against the backdrop of a number of strategic challenges some of which include a highly uncertain geopolitical and economic environment, a constraint national fiscal environment, a decline in our expenditure on research and development as a percentage of GDP and not so long ago, the withdrawal of funding by the US government of critical joint science projects.

Secondly, we regard the Annual Performance Plan of our Department and those of our Entities not only as critical planning instruments, but also as tools that should enable us to respond innovatively and in a sustainable way to the challenges that arise from both the domestic and global environments.

For this reason, our 2026/27 Annual Performance Plan builds on the momentum of the key programmes that we implemented during the 2025/26 financial year and seeks to strengthen our capacity to raise the scale and impact our key programmes for the years ahead.

Thirdly, to maintain the momentum of the previous financial year, we will continue to take decisive steps to significantly strengthen our Department’s key priority areas, this includes the following:

• Taking decisive steps to ensure that we achieve our target of 1. 5% of GDP by 2030 for our Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD);
• With the assistance of our Entities like the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) we will continue to enhance the coherence and policy priorities of our National System of Innovation through instruments such as STI Presidential Plenary, Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC), and others;
• We will continue to accelerate the transformation of our National System of Innovation by among others, intensifying the transformation and expansion of science, technology and innovation human resources and our research workforce;
• As part of this, just last Thursday, the Minister launched a staggering 41 new Research Chairs which are aligned to the priorities of our Decadal Plan. The over overarching objective our Research Chairs initiative is enhance the research capacity of historically disadvantaged institutions, Universities of Technology and emerging Universities and to ensure we produce a sufficient number of young, black and women researchers and scientists;
• In support of government’s just energy transition and under the leadership of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Hydrogen Economy, we will continue to accelerate the implementation of our Hydrogen South Africa Research, Development and Innovation Strategy and Hydrogen Society Road Map (HSRM);
• The global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that a country’s capacity to respond effectively to any national health emergency is largely dependent on the investments that are made in the period preceding the outbreak of such health emergency;
• We will therefore continue to strengthen our pandemic preparedness capacity and in particular, our vaccine manufacturing capabilities. Our ability to achieve our key objectives will also depend on the quality of the partnerships we form;
• We will therefore continue to strengthen our innovation compacts with STI-intensive departments, agencies, and our State-owned Enterprises, whose priorities align with those of our Decadal Plan for Science, Technology, and Innovation (2022-2032);
• Using the expertise of our entities like the South African National Space Agency (SANSA), we will continue to provide various spheres of government with critical disaster prevention and management support in the form of satellite mapping for infrastructure planning and damage assessment and using the Geospatial Flooding Index and decision-support tools;
• We will continue the focus on maintaining and upgrading our key science infrastructure and projects such as the Square Kilometre Array, Nuclear Medicine Research Infrastructure (NuMeRI); and
• To sustain our key programmes and raise their scale under the constraint fiscal environment, we will continue to mobilise additional funding and resources for strategic programmes such as artificial intelligence, energy security, space, vaccine innovation manufacturing, Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

In conclusion, our 2026/27 Annual Performance Plan and those of our Entities like NACI, are an expression of our continued commitment to using science, technology and innovation in developing solutions for national challenges such as the social transformation of our economy, breaking the grip of structural inequality, poverty, and unemployment, building safer, cohesive, and stable communities, and contributing to building a capable, ethical developmental state.

With these few words, may I therefore hand over to the DG to lead the Presentation.

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