At the University of the Western Cape [UWC], USSAS supports forty or fifty students in undergraduate programs of all sorts. Each USSAS bursary recipient is required to go through AIDS Awareness and Prevention training run by Dr. Tania Vergnani. These students then work on campus in the anti-AIDS campaign that has become a permanent part of the UWC program. IN addition, USSAS, in cooperation with Dr. Vergnani and the Director of Admissions, Mr. Rensche Bell, has launched a new program to recruit secondary school graduates who are AIDS-impacted, either by being themselves HIV positive, or through having lost family to the disease. These students will come to UWC as undergraduates, where they will meet together as a mutual support group to help them overcome the terrible depression and discouragement suffered by students who discover that they are HIV positive, or whose families are struck by AIDS.

At the Durban Institute of Technology, USSAS works with Dr. Frida Rundell, who heads up a Social Work Program there awarding B. Technikon and M. Technikon degrees to students being prepared to address the needs of AIDS-impacted South Africans. While studying, the twenty students supported by USSAS do fieldwork at Drop-in Clinics, Shelters for street children, facilities for children arrested and awaiting trial, and Testing Sites. These students are among only a handful in all of South Africa who are being professionally trained to meet the needs of the hundreds of thousands of children who are being orphaned by AIDS. All of the Social Work students being supported by USSAS are Black.

At the Medical University of South Africa [MEDUNSA], USSAS supports ten Black medical students to who are preparing to become doctors serving the Black population of South Africa. MEDUNSA is one of only South African medical schools that focus on training students from the Black majority. The White South African community has a long tradition of outstanding medical training and cutting edge experimentation, but more and more, the White students who graduate from South Africa’s medical schools emigrate to the United States, Europe, or Australia, so that their expertise is lost to the South African population.