Sponsored by Eskom. This award has been broadened this year to allow for teams to be nominated and for Engineering Capacity Development which leads to Engineering research capacity development to be recognised. The framework of the award remains the same.

The NSTF under the guidance of a team of experts through the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA) and the Network of Data and Information Curation Communities (NeDICC) re-modelled this category last year. The NSTF continues this category introduced in 2017, which is meant to acknowledge the work of an individual or a team (including for example researchers/scientists; data scientists; data stewards; innovators; and repository and data centre managers) to be rewarded for the generation, preservation, sharing and/or re-use of a valuable scientific output – the research data set. Data products, data repositories and data centres are also eligible for team recognition. The intention is to recognise the value of a data set that is of national interest or for the public good, and that is openly available to be re-used and / or re-packaged in products that are of public good and interest, or that could be integrated into products that contribute to the development of South Africa.

Was introduced in 2015 under the sponsorship of GreenMatter. In 2018 the sponsorship was taken over by The Lewis Foundation. Last year The Lewis Foundation, whilst still associated with the NSTF, moved its funding to the NSTF Brilliants Programme (for the top science and mathematics matriculants) and the award was discontinued. The NSTF has decided to re-establish the NSTF Green Economy Award in the hopes that a new sponsor will soon come forward for this vital area for innovation, research and development.

With a view to making clearer the interpretation of Terms and Conditions, section 2, sub-paragraph 2, Note 1 has been added.  The note spells out category by category how previous winners might approach a further nomination. This has particular relevance to teams where a member of the team has been a previous winner.