Summary

There is an increasing global and regional focus, particularly within the Southern African Development Community (SADC), on the responsibility of higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage with society. The call is for HEIs to integrate societal engagement into their core academic activities and build meaningful partnerships with local communities for the co-production of knowledge. The Engage SDG project seeks to promote the engaged university model by emphasizing the use of participatory approaches to knowledge production and their potential to foster innovative relationships between SADC universities and their surrounding communities, aimed at addressing societal challenges.

The project defines participatory approaches (PAs) to knowledge co-production as processes that involve solving a problem or designing an innovation in collaboration with those directly affected by its outcomes.

A key objective of the project is to introduce an Integrated Participatory Framework (IPF)—a decision-making tool designed to help HEIs in Mauritius, Zambia, South Africa, and the broader SADC region select contextually relevant PAs. This framework will guide institutions in identifying which approaches are best suited for specific interventions, while also building capacity for their practical implementation.

Through this initiative, SADC universities will be empowered to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their local contexts, using participatory approaches. The project will focus particularly on the SDGs that align with regional development goals in the SADC and the strategic priorities of individual universities. It will explore specific PAs that are particularly relevant to addressing selected SDGs or specific targets within those goals.