SOUTHERN AFRICA

Project focuses on enhancing impactful societal research
The Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) is undertaking a project to identify the incentives for and barriers to conducting meaningful, solutions-driven research in countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).The research and engagement project, which is being funded by the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and will be spearheaded by SARUA, is expected to address pertinent questions on how current academic practices at universities in the SADC enable or constrain researchers in conducting society-oriented research.
The project, ‘Exploring the incentives for and barriers to conducting societally impactful research community of practice in the Southern African Development Community’ (ICSIR), was launched through a webinar earlier in April. However, it has already been running since February 2024 and will continue until April 2025.
Knowledge co-production
During his presentation, Martin Oosthuizen, the executive director of SARUA, highlighted the significance of the ICSIR’s projects and its contribution to the organisation’s strategic objectives in the region, particularly in the area of knowledge co-production.
“As SARUA, we see our mission as based on collective action that makes a difference to regional development. We place strong emphasis on the concept of the engaged university … and we wish to create a network that supports the principle of higher education engagement. We do that through environmental scanning and sense-making, webinars, surveys, consultative meeting and communities of practice.
“We believe that no higher education institution in the SADC, no matter how good or influential, can go it alone. We need to work together and support each other to make a principled and coordinated contribution to regional development. We appreciate that the environment is changing rapidly, so we must prepare institutions for future challenges as a network [by] focusing on higher education development, and empowering institutions for innovation, resilience and inclusivity.
“This project epitomises what SARUA is about and it’s about exploring and pushing boundaries, and about understanding how the higher education institutions’ network in the SADC can make a contribution to societal development that is sustainable and impactful,” he said.
A community of practice
During the event, SARUA made a strong call for higher education ecosystems within the SADC and beyond, including researchers, funders, faculty members and publishers to join the community of practice (CoP) and contribute towards the formulation of a proposal for a dynamic research agenda.
The collaborative action research agenda, a key outcome envisaged for the project, would address, among other critical issues, how national and institutional reward systems could be adapted to better incentivise researchers to engage in societally impactful research, including a specific focus on issues of gender, equity and inclusion.
The agenda would also explore how other dimensions of the research and innovation ecosystems need to adapt to support such national or institutional shifts; and how government stakeholders in the SADC region and international research funders could encourage and support positive change within these systems.
Tracy Bailey, the principal investigator for ICSIR, told University World News that, at the heart of this project is a community of practice, which is being developed to combine engagement, research and learning activities, and it will be based upon the active and ongoing participation of key stakeholders in the shaping and co-production of knowledge, outputs and outcomes.
The CoP would be strategically positioned to bring in diverse voices from African institutions, funders, and publishers and other research and educational actors to contribute towards building the research agenda.
“This is an engagement-based project and also has an emergent design which means that, as we engage and collaborate with all our colleagues in the SADC, we will be able to decide which African countries and institutions will be included for specific research. The community of practice will involve the whole of the SADC higher education systems but will also be open to Sub-Saharan universities,” she said.
“We want this project to be the voice of African universities in terms of addressing what they need, how things are done in Africa, what challenges and problems we are confronted with in our societies, but also in our universities, so that this project is as tailor-made and customised to the needs of African universities as possible.”
The CoP offers members of higher education systems in Africa the opportunity to shape a research agenda, which the IDRC and other funders could consider supporting going forward.
“These 15 months are going to be a collaborative process whereby we are inviting people from African universities, specifically in the SADC, to participate in the development of a collaborative action research agenda. The outcome will be more research into understanding how we fund, publish and do more research that can have a real impact in African societies,” Bailey said.
Equitable and inclusive standards
Katie Bryant, programme officer at the IDRC, highlighted that the IDRC funds and supports research and innovation in a number of critical areas such as global health, climate and adaptation, sustainable, inclusive economies and democratic and inclusive governance.
“Our intention as IDRC is to fund researchers who are based and working in various countries in the Global South. My division focuses on education and science, and one of the key focus areas is ensuring that science, research and innovation systems within the Global South are inclusive.
“The research we support has public impact and really bridges that divide between research and action and ensures that it’s continuously being used to bring solutions to achieve the various development goals, particularly the Sustainable Development Goals,” Bryant said.
Kristin Corbett, a senior strategic knowledge translation officer with the policy and evaluation division at IDRC, also emphasised that in supporting high quality research, it is also important to understand the complex research systems in which many researchers work and the need to foster ethical, equitable and inclusive standards.
“The interest in the project goes beyond IDRC as a funder. We participate in a network of public and private funders that are seized with questions on how we, as funders, can work with universities, science granting councils, publishers, and other key actors in research ecosystems to reward and recognise those engaged in societally impactful research,” Corbett stated.
This article was updated on 19 April.