The millennium development goals as a conceptual framework for enabling and evaluating community engagement

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite numerous attempts by scholars to clarify ‘community engagement’, it remains a vague concept in South African higher education institutions. Conceptual frameworks are sorely lacking and there are no universally accepted standards against which to measure the impact of community engagement. In this article an attempt is made to clarify this concept by proposing the Millennium Development Goals as a conceptual framework for enabling and evaluating community engagement. In so doing, the author has built on the work of scholars who have positioned community engagement as a scholarly activity and integrated it with research and teaching, as well as those who have done work on linking community engagement to development objectives. By adopting the Millennium Development Goals as a framework for community engagement, it is proposed that higher education institutions would be able to position community engagement within the sustainable development discourse. This framework would also facilitate the integration of the activities of research, training and community engagement by directing such activities towards the common objective of global sustainable development, thereby creating an enabling environment for academics to articulate community engagement activities. The Millennium Development Goals conceptual framework could be the starting point for the development of a monitoring tool which could lead to increased accountability when planning and evaluating community engagement activities.