By Basirat Oyalowo.
How can transdisciplinarity in Africa help achieve higher education’s third mission, namely making a contribution to society? What are the best pathways for achieving this? What are the key obstructions and potential ways around them?
Higher education’s third mission involves adding to the first two missions of teaching and research towards providing service to society. However, general pathways to achieving this are still unclear. A few studies have explored how and why the local impacts of universities need to be measured, but these are generally from outside Africa and concentrate more on quantitative methods to measure specific impact, such as economic impact.
Transdisciplinarity provides opportunities to consider the diversity of societal needs and values, to benefit from local knowledge, to involve scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups. It therefore offers a platform for advancing higher education’s third mission. Indeed a useful definition of transdisciplinarity is the process of transformation that occurs when collaborative research is decentralised to include the engagement of both academic and non-academic experts on equal terms in seeking solutions to complex societal problems.
Transdisciplinarity encourages researchers to reflective introspection on questions such as: Why are we interested in this problem? Who would benefit, other than us and possibly our funder? Towards whose good should our research be tailored? And where are beneficiaries in the knowledge production process?
Transdisciplinarity is an approach that makes research inclusive, recognizing the limits of science (and its experts) and respecting the knowledge of non-academic experts from society, the governed and the governors. Transdisciplinarity is in harmony with the movement for decolonization and quest for national development. More profoundly, it provides a nexus between academic research and societal change.
Incorporating transdisciplinarity into teaching enhances the learning experience for students by linking taught topics with real life projects. In research, transdisciplinarity goes beyond disciplinary boundaries to immerse the researcher in multiple, yet integrated, means of learning to address complex real-world problems. When the teaching and research arms are brought together, transdisciplinarity in the third mission will add immense value.
Global challenges demand responses at the local level, and today, every city or town with a university faces one particular challenge or another. Conflicts in land use, urban violence, the political economy of corrupt governance, management of natural resources in the face of ethnic diversity, social services bifurcating social needs and economic realities, non-recognition of the opportunities in everyday informality, climate change, and repressive societies are made more complex by their linkages and interaction with one another. These challenges are quite visible, in varying degrees of severity, across most African cities and universities could play a more involved role in their resolution.
Accomplishing the third mission of higher education lies in unravelling these complexities. Transdisciplinary education and research offer a platform for optimising the latent resources African universities possess, in terms of their institutional position and geographical situation within cities.
By incorporating transdisciplinarity into their corporate mission and vision, and actively implementing associated strategies, African higher education can strategically provide actionable solutions to local problems. However, this requires forging transdisciplinary partnerships that provide resources for lecturers to teach global concepts with local knowledge and researchers to co-produce solutions to local problems, whether this is in terms of tackling malaria, closing digital divides, enhancing social capital for stronger subnational governance, tackling flooding, enhancing agricultural productivity or supporting incubation centres to develop local manufacturing and information and communication technology.
However, the demands of transdisciplinarity require that educators and researchers take on new roles outside their scientific and disciplinary knowledge. Skills in collaborating, moderating, negotiating and advocacy become new criteria for expertise across all disciplines. African universities must recognise, facilitate and reward the acquisition and deployment of these skills.
What are the key obstructions to achieving this from an African context and how might those obstacles be overcome? Four key impediments and ways of countering them are described:
- Finding financial investment for transdisciplinarity is daunting. Overall, there is a scarcity of human, financial and material resources.
But failure to address these problems is also inordinately expensive. Partnerships can help to equitably spread costs, and social benefits could tip the scale in favour of transdisciplinary investment.
- Disciplinary fixation could undermine transdisciplinary collaborations. The peculiarities of colonial heritage, coupled with Western influences in defining knowledge, and the difficulties in accessing higher education and obtaining a discipline-based qualification, can make it difficult to move beyond disciplines.
To counteract this, universities must support, at all levels, inter-faculty collaborations and also ensure this connects to partners outside of the academic system, but this must be framed within a solution-minded agenda.
- Internal academic activities such as interdisciplinary conferences, meetings and events are not always designed to translate to solutions.
There is considerable potential to reposition these events, which are often highly visible, so that they contribute to actual solutions for real societal impact.
- International university rankings, that disproportionately outweigh local achievements, local acceptance and local impact, reduce the drive to transdisciplinarity.
This can be countered by assessing university performance from the perspective of local communities to measure impact.
What is your experience of universities achieving higher education’s third mission of contributing to society? Can you point to examples of how transdisciplinary collaborations in your institution solved local problems in the local community? Are there other arguments that you would add to those laid out above?
To find out more:
Oyalowo, B. (2022). An Agenda for Transdisciplinary Research for Achieving African Higher Education’s Third Mission. Journal of Educational Studies, 21, 1: 11-30. (Online): https://journals.co.za/doi/full/10.10520/ejc-jeds_v21_n1_a2
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Basirat Oyalowo PhD is a senior lecturer in real estate at the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research and advocacy straddles housing justice, urban governance and sustainability. She is affiliated to the African Research Network for Urbanization and Habitable Cities hosted by the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and is a member of the leadership board of the Global Alliance for Inter-and Transdisciplinarity.
This is a truly enriching read. The third leg of the academic journey — often overlooked — is profoundly important. Beyond teaching and research, it is service that binds the academy to the broader society. This leg represents the critical nexus between town and gown, where knowledge moves beyond theory into real-world application, shaping communities and being shaped in return.
Dr. Basirat, thank you for your insightful study, blog post and the call for transdisciplinary engagement.
As the piece rightly emphasizes, for African academia to remain relevant and impactful, it must embrace partnerships with society, co-producing knowledge that addresses local challenges. When scholars step beyond institutional walls and engage with the realities on the ground, they do more than teach or publish — they transform.
This is the kind of academic work that gives back — that reflects and redefines what our society becomes. It’s not just about contributing to knowledge, but about ensuring that knowledge contributes to people.
Thank you for your comments. I absolutely agree with you: scholars really need to step beyond their institutional and disciplinary walls to be truly transformative.
Thank you, Dr. Basirat, for this insightful read. I was particularly intrigued by the statement that local universities should be assessed based on their impact on their immediate communities. I find this both instructive and thought-provoking. It suggests a pathway perhaps not a smooth one, but certainly possible toward encouraging universities to engage more meaningfully with their local contexts.
By adopting global best practices that are grounded in the contextualization of societal challenges, universities can become true agents of transformation. Well done Doc!
Thanks for your comments. Sometimes, external push factors can be the catalyst for impactful engagement between universities and their host communities. There is much to gain by all parties if universities connect with these communities and contribute to solving local problems.
Hi Norma, thank you for your comment. I agree with you about nature being a stakeholder. I believe that indigenous communities are highly qualified to bring in their expertise to issues in this area and that we need to listen more to them directly while also listening to nature in our undertakings. It is the decades of disregard for nature that have accumulated into the climate change impacts that we see today-nature has a way of fighting back and reminding us, if only we listen! Higher education institutions and private-sector research and development units hold massive power in decisions about research that ultimately translate into products with the negative impacts you highlighted in agriculture and other areas, while we recognize that there are also several positive impacts. I imagine that if these actors institutionalize a transdisciplinary lens in their corporate roles, we can move closer to advancing the reciprocal relationship you wrote about.
Hi Basirat. Your reply is well expressed. Yes, these actors need to institutionalise and activate a transdisciplinary perspective that is value-based in favor of reciprocal relations between the stakeholders involved (including listening to nature in our undertakings)!
Hi Norma,
Thanks for your comments, and I look forward to learning more from you in this area.
Hello again dear Basirat
I have been thinking again about your entry and realising that maybe we need to put more stress on the fact that “science” as normally defined in Educational Higher Institutions is itself a contested concept. So when you speak of ‘engagement of both academic and non-academic experts’, we need to point out that academia itself needs to be decolonised so that within academia the ’experts’ (or professional researchers) include those who do not subscribe to Western-originated definitions of science, but who appreciate Indigenous holistic ways of doing (ethno)science. Once we recognise this, we are more able to see how scientists working in academia can relate in collaboration with lay researchers in communities (such as, say, farmers in rural communities) who have an alternative ontology and epistemology. In the field of agroecology it means cooperation between academics who are doing science in tune with an understanding of the connections between humans and all Earth beings and Indigenous rural farmers who for centuries have done their long-term experiments (in situ) to find ways of sustaining themselves as well as the environment of which they see themselves as a part.
So when you speak of involving scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups (in which we can also include all Earth beings as stakeholders), we should at the same time realise that the definition of good “science” needs to be revisited as part of efforts to decolonise the academy. I think you will agree with this because of your emphasis on appreciating different ways of knowing (which would include different ways of doing science). I am going to attach a few references that point to this idea. The first is a book edited by Patrick Ngulube (2025) called ‘Harvesting Indigenous Epistemologies for Sustainable Progress’. It can be found at: https://www.igi-global.com/book/harnessing-indigenous-epistemologies-sustainable-progress/350554
In his Introduction to the book, Ngulube notes that one of its objectives is to:
Uphold the epistemic rights of Indigenous peoples and enrich scholarly discourse with diverse methodologies and perspectives through ’indigenizing of the academy’ (2025, p. xv) In other words, not only should academics (so-called academic experts) collaborate with other experts situated in communities, but they should use this as an opportunity to rethink the grounds of their apparent expertise. Or as he puts it differently, the idea (to break the hegemony of Western science) is to ‘promote cognitive fairness in academic institutions by emphasising indigenous knowledge and epistemic freedom’ (p. xvi). Would you agree that this is part of the move towards transdisciplinarity?
In the field of agroecology, I want to offer two examples of how scientific researchers situated in academia can work alongside networks of farmers and other stakeholders (including nature) while appreciating that a science which works by isolating variables for analysis at a distance, in the long run is likely to generate adverse effects for both people and planet.
You rightfully raised the question that should be asked when doing research: ‘Why are we interested in this problem? Who would benefit, other than us and possibly our funder?’ Yes the problem thus far as I see it with the science that fuelled the so-called Green revolution in Asia and is now being transported to other continents, means that even small-scale farmers come to rely on chemical fertilisers, pesticides and GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) seeds created by large multinational corporations, with detrimental consequences. They lose control over the production and consumption process while their soils became depleted, their water and air became polluted, and their knowledge of, and propagation of, their own resilient seeds becomes devalued by the experts, and their funders. Anyway, the reference I am supplying in this regard is ‘Agroecology, Regenerative Agriculture, and Nature-Based Solutions’ (2022), with lead authors: Lídia Cabral, Elizabeth Rainey, and Dominic Glover. It is an open access book. It has some good points (in relation to your piece) about collaboration with partners that is mutually beneficial and also beneficial for the planet. Pages 12 and 13 of the book provide a good summary of this kind of collaboration. Here is the reference to the book: https://ipes-food.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/SmokeAndMirrors_BackgroundStudy.pdf
And lastly, there is an article that was published this year springing from one of the sessions at last year’s International Society for Systems Sciences 68th annual conference. The lead author is Mphatheleni Makaulule. Mphathe founded a CBO (Community-Based Organisation) in Venda in South Africa in 2007, called Dzomo la Mupo (the voice of spirit of nature). This article offers a metalogue between some of the members of the CoP (Community of Practice; including myself), which provides a sense of how we have co-operated while learning from each other and from nature, in relation to felt issues of concern. As we indicate in our Abstract: ‘We discuss the expansion of an organisational network, which involves organic farmers, trainers from an international organic farmers organisation; and community engaged university-aligned researchers’ [from various universities]. We indicate at the same time how we are trying to challenge dominant social, political, and economic narratives and practices which are being disseminated across the globe concerning the meaning of ‘development’. The article can be accessed at: https://journals.isss.org/index.php/jisss/issue/view/26
I think that these pieces all lend substance to your proposed approach, while offering some extensions. I look forward to hearing your (and other readers’) response!
With good wishes,
Norma
Hello Basirat. Thanks for this well thought out definition of transdisciplinarity as an approach that makes research inclusive, and that when considered this way supports the movement for decolonization while providing a nexus between academic research and societal change. I would add that from an Indigenous local perspective, the idea would be to pursue social as well as ecological benefits, because many Indigenous and local communities recognise that we as humans are inextricably connected with “mother nature” and also that she is a stakeholder (who should have a voice) in all decision making. So I would add her into your discussion of stakeholders! That means also that instead of speaking about management of natural resources as if nature is a resource to be used by humans, we should speak of a reciprocal relationship with “nature” (of which are are a part) and consider her wellbeing (and not only because she serves humans), in her own right. I was unsure when you spoke of agricultural productivity if you catered for the fact that experts who pose as expert scientists are pushing fertilisers and other chemical inputs and poisons in the form of pesticides and GMO seeds, on the grounds that they know that this is helpful for productivity. They do not consider the harmful effects on the soil and water and air and human health – which is understood by Indigenous farmers . That is why it is crucial that the local communities develop what is called food sovereignty where they control the food production process according to their understanding of links with mother nature. Anyway, these are just the thoughts that came to my mind when I read your piece! I agree with you that thus far Higher Education Institutions are designed not to incorporate the contributions of local communities in the knowledge production process. This needs to be changed to provide for the kind of transdisciplinary approach that you are endorsing. Thanks again, Norma