Advancing Community Engagement in Higher Education Institutions in South Africa: Addressing the Leadership Gap

Abstract

Globally, higher education institutions are charged with the responsibility to play three roles, which are teaching and learning, research, and community engagement. This chapter focuses on the third mission, community engagement. Reviewed literature has revealed that teaching and learning and research in higher education have had greater attention and support from the government, while community engagement remained at the periphery of this support. The success in teaching and learning and research in higher education in South Africa stems from its astute leadership, whereas the same cannot be said with community engagement. A plethora of literature has revealed that the challenges experienced in community engagement in higher education in South Africa include among others lack of, and leadership, lack and insufficient funding, and lack of outcome evaluation for example. This chapter focuses on the leadership gap in community engagement with specific attention given to four (n = 4) purposively selected institutions of higher education. The main objective was to identify the challenges impacting the successes or lack of it in community engagement efforts in higher education in South Africa. This is desktop qualitative document analysis conducted to analyse the alignment between the strategic plan and the annual reports.