1. Regional Prize for Women scientists - Life and Earth Sciences Category

a. Prof. Aletta Schutte from Southern Region

• Professor of Physiology and funded by the Department of Science and Technology as the South African Research Chair (SARChI) in the Early Detection and Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease in Africa – hosted by the Hypertension in Africa Research Team (HART) at the North-West University. Her research focuses on a better understanding of the development of hypertension in African populations’.

b. Prof. Naziha ATTI from the Northern Region

• Holds engineering and PhD degrees from National Institute of Agronomy of Tunisia (INAT). Her main areas of research are in Sheep and Goat Science Production and their product quality. She co-developed a body condition score notation proper to fat-tail sheep breeds permitting the in vivo prediction of body composition. She has an extensive bibliography with 150 publications, 90 of them are scientific articles (h-index: 18, 1150 citations)

2. Continental awards for the Earth and Life Science category

a. Professor David M. Richardson from South Africa

• Director of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology and is a Distinguished Professor of Ecology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His field of work is invasion science which deals with the full spectrum of issues pertaining to alien and invasive species and the phenomenon of biological invasions. He has received numerous national and international awards. In 2006 he received the prestigious Hans Sigrist Prize from the University of Bern, Switzerland.

3. Continental awards for Basic Science, Technology and Innovation Category

a. Professor Abdel-Shafy Fahmy Obada from Egypt

• Carries out research studies that deal with the interaction of fields with matter. In the seventies and eighties Obada and co-workers produced papers devoted to reaction field theory that played a fundamental role in the radiation theory since it was first introduced by Lorentz (1909). Prof. Obada and his group have made a significant print in the fields of quantum, optics, quantum information, quantum computation.