Developing a financial framework for community engagement financial function(s) within a higher education institution

Abstract

Community engagement (CE) became a formal task of Higher Education when the Higher Education Act (no 101 of 1997) identified CE as a function of all South African Universities (South Africa, 1997). CE entails the reciprocal, beneficial collaboration between communities and Universities. The Africa Unit for Transdisciplinary Health Research (AUTHeR) coordinates a large-scale community engagement programme for the Faculty of Health Sciences, North West University (NWU). This programme is known as the Well-being INnovation (WIN) platform. Its goal is to create sustainable livelihoods and promoting healthy lifestyles for communities accessible to the NWU. The WIN platform was activated in 2011, is situated in Vaalharts and focuses on vulnerable communities. Various models of community engagement exist in South Africa, such as the silo model, the intersection model and the cross-sectional model. Community engagement is a costly activity and requires multiple resources such as travel cost, time and field workers. The resources can be underestimated when dealing with communities that are far away and require travel and accommodation costs. In 2017, AUTHeR activated a National Research Foundation (NRF)-funded Community Engagement project to develop a reciprocal community-university engagement framework, which is applied to the WIN platform. One objective of this project was to explore and understand the actual financial activities within the WIN platform based on researchers' experiences of the costs of community engagement. A second objective was to inform the framework to include the critical financial functions within community engagement projects. The study identifies a gap in literature highlights the lack of evidence required to propose a financial framework for reciprocal university-community engagement. This research aimed to critically analyse the financial functions of community engagement within the WIN platform in order to propose a framework for the financial function of the CE activities in Higher Education. A holistic, single-case case study of the WIN platform was conducted, and documents were analysed through a qualitative approach. After ethical clearance, access to the documents was obtained and an all-inclusive sampling was conducted from all the WIN platform documents related to financial functions, included all budgets, funding applications, grant approval letters, project plans, strategic plans and project reports (n=88). Document analysis was done according to a predetermined checklist based on key performance objectives, which included inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact elements. ATLAS.ti was utilised to support the thematic analysis, which identified seven (7) main themes. Field notes were kept, and a consensus discussion was conducted. The research confirms that inputs for CE are a high priority because of the various resources that are channelled into a CE project at its start. However, activities are not documented in sufficient detail and therefore under-reporting on projects within the larger platform exists. Various expenses that form part of activities were identified, of which the greatest are travel and accommodation cost and field workers. Outputs were divided into research outputs, the number of research articles and the output of CE. Generally, project outputs were insufficiently reported. As a whole, CE outcomes were reported in terms of finances and activities' performance measured as budgets against actual expenditure, as well as superficial reporting on performance outcomes. Despite the comprehensive effort related to CE projects, the impact of CE was not identified nor reported. The research concludes with a proposed financial framework for CE at Higher Education institutions in South Africa. This proposed framework may assist in the governance of CE between the various stakeholders. This framework includes the various reporting, regulations and governance requirements for various CE projects and activities. The main limitation of this study was that fact that it was based on a single-case study within a specific context.