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Abstract: South Africa is a young democracy and its constitutional mandate is to make both basic and higher education accessible and affordable to its citizens. In particular, there is a growing demand for higher education sector to transform through decolonization of the curriculum, provision of free education, improving the employability of its graduates and ensuring its relevance to the communities it serves. While university leadership has responded to addressing these issues, dissatisfaction with the higher education system continues amongst communities and businesses. This dissatisfaction could also be attributed to the continuing exclusion of the previously disadvantaged race groups, delayed redress of the past injustices, separation of the university and the community it serves, graduate employability and the high youth unemployment rate in South Africa. This paper argues that more effective transformational leadership is required to enhance community engagement within a complex and rapidly changing environment. The research method is exploratory and is informed by documentary analysis of policies, journals, books and reports. The article reviews the context of higher education in South Africa and aligns the transformational leadership roles required to enhance community engagement. The findings indicate that both the higher education institutions and communities operates within a highly complex political, social and economic environment that could limit the role of the leaders to deliver on the constitutional mandates. The findings are significant as it reflects on the university leadership towards transforming communities to lead better lives. To this end, South Africa, as a developmental state, requires the state, communities and the higher education sector to align its vision and mission to ensure political and economic sustainability for the majority of the previously disadvantaged groups.
Keywords: transformation, leadership, community engagement, monitoring, evaluation, higher education
1. Introduction
My aim in this paper is not to construct a comprehensive framework for transformational leadership that results in effective community engagement. I am more concerned with exploring a conceptual framework within the current higher education and community engagement contexts in South Africa. This paper is part of a broader study in community engagement supported by the National Research Foundation in South Africa.
Universities in South Africa are public sector institutions controlled by the Ministry of higher education and its associated enterprises that is required to show evidence of...