South Africa's higher education sector plays a pivotal role in the national system of innovation it houses the largest R&D workforce in the country, with two-thirds of total R&D personnel working in this sector. In 2020/21, higher education was responsible for 41.1% of total R&D spending in the country. Natural sciences, technology and engineering continue to dominate higher education research, but only marginally more so than the social sciences and humanities. Researchers from other countries make up almost a quarter of the total in higher education, most of them postgraduates.
Human Sciences Research Council (Wed,) studied this question.