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The South African-German Centre for Development Research and Criminal Justice is the only centre in South Africa chosen for support by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) as part of their current "African Excellence" initiative. In addition to the centre at the UWC, this initiative will lead to the establishment of four other African-German centres of excellence which will be based in Ghana, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as in Tanzania and Namibia. The establishment of such centres of excellence is a cornerstone in the new DAAD programmes for Africa for which funding is being provided by the German Federal Foreign Office.

The goal of the African Excellence programme is to contribute significantly to the raising of the quality and relevance of education in selected fields at the chosen African universities, in particular by expanding the teaching and research capacity of such institutions and by promoting effective forms of networking between themselves, their German partners and other research institutions. The new centres will aim to provide postgraduate students with state-of-the-art education and training of the highest international standards, whilst at the same time promoting high quality, collaborative research and innovative forms of international cooperation. In its postgraduate teaching and research activities, the DRD will build upon the long established cooperation between UWC and the Ruhr University of Bochum.

Within the framework of cooperating in Masters and PhD programmes, the aim of the Division of Development Research of the Centre is to prepare the next generation of leaders to meet the typical economic, social and political challenges arising from the development process. The research-oriented training programmes already established at the Ruhr-University of Bochum and the University of the Western Cape have been run in close cooperation for several years now. The course offerings are sourced from the disciplines of economics and social sciences (particularly macroeconomics and political science) and the administrative sciences. The course programme is supplemented by substantial inputs from the fields of project management and empirical social research. The programmes are theory-based but also have a strong empirical focus. Regional case studies are intended to provide scope for analysis from both the macro and micro perspective:

• Characteristics and causes of growth deficits and unequal resource distribution in developing countries as well as strategic approaches and flanking socio-political measures for growth and poverty reduction,
• Roles of various players in the development process and their interaction
• Approaches to reform in the areas of domestic economy and international economic relations, public administration (good governance, combating corruption, and reorganization) and social as well as political systems.

In order to adequately prepare the next generation of leaders through research-oriented training it is not sufficient to have the possibility to award scholarships to promising candidates from all over Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is also necessary to maintain a strong research focus on the work of the centre and to cooperate closely with other leading universities in the region.