King’s honour for UCT academic

For her tireless services to children’s well-being and to global public health, Professor Lucie Cluver, an honorary professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town (UCT), has been appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours List.

Professor Cluver is also a professor of Child and Family Social Work at the University of Oxford. Cluver has co-led a team across UCT and Oxford for the past 14 years alongside Associate Professor Elona Toska, director of the Accelerate Research Hub; and with Professor Cathy Ward, director of the Safety and Violence Initiative and the Centre for Social Science Research – jointly leading research to provide evidence to improve the lives of children and adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Birthday Honours List recognises celebrities and local community heroes for their amazing achievements or service to the United Kingdom (UK). “I am honoured and amazed at being given this award. Every impact that we have had is because of an incredible team of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and colleagues – across South Africa and the UK – who are dedicated to improving the lives of children. Being at the University of Oxford and University of Cape Town gives us an incredible privilege: the academic freedom to pursue research that can directly help the most vulnerable,” said Cluver.

“They wanted to know what the most effective and affordable ways would be to protect children.”

From 2019 to 2024, Cluver, together with Associate Professor Toska, led the UKRI GCRF Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub, a £20 million interdisciplinary research hub working to improve the lives of children and adolescents. In 2022, with Professor Ward, she became the co-principal investigator of the Global Parenting Initiative, a collaboration of universities, foundations and charities which provides free support to parents to equip them with the tools to prevent child sexual abuse, exploitation, and family violence.

Research

During the pandemic, Cluver co-led the COVID-19 emergency parenting response with another honorary member of UCT, Professor Jamie Lachman, and colleagues at the Centre for Social Science Research at UCT, supported by Ward and Toska, to develop emergency parenting resources for lockdowns and school closures. Working with the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), these resources reached over 210 million people in 198 countries and territories and were used by 34 governments in their national COVID-19 responses.

“In 2002, I was a social worker in Nyanga, trying to help mothers and children who were dying of HIV/AIDS. I asked local charities what they needed, and to my astonishment they said ‘research’: they wanted to know what the most effective and affordable ways would be to protect children. Now we work with governments, United Nations agencies and donors, to answer the same question, and find solutions for millions of children who deserve the most effective support,” Cluver reflected.