Community engagement in African agricultural universities: challenges to the institutionalisation of engaged scholarship

Community engagement in Africa outside South Africa has attracted relatively limitedscholarly attention, and there continues to be limited documentation of how African uni-versities engage with external communities and institutionalise community engagementpractices. In this study, we scrutinise how agriculture university schools enact communityengagement. We conducted a longitudinal multi-case study from 2021 to 2023 of eightagricultural schools located in East, West, and North Africa. The study used a multi-meth-odology research strategy applying document analysis, two surveys, five group interviews,and 42 individual semi-structured interviews. Survey data were analysed using descriptivestatistics, and document and interview data were transcribed and analysed using thematicanalysis. The findings show that agriculture-related community engagement is a highlydiverse phenomenon, implemented with varied breadth and depth across the eight cases.Students’ attachment, internships, and entrepreneurship teaching and support constituteimportant means of community engagement across the eight cases. We identify several fac-tors facilitating and hindering the institutionalisation of community engagement. Externalfunding can provide both opportunities and barriers, depending on whether projects arestrategically leveraged for further institutionalisation. A major barrier to adopting engagedscholarship practices is that community engagement is equated with the traditional out-reach function of agricultural universities. We contend that enhanced conceptual clarityand methodological awareness may be necessary to embrace and institutionalise more con-temporary engagement practices to deal with the hyper-complexity that African rural com-munities face.