Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) structural conditions are mostly considered unfavorable to foster academics’ societal engagement (ASE)—that is collaboration between higher education institutions and external stakeholders in general and university–industry linkages in particular. The received view is that ASE in SSA empirically studied only through macro-structural data related to approaches and metrics of national innovation system or knowledge-based economy will predictably display weak portrait and potentially not make visible specific patterns that ASE in SSA may have. This theory-led study reports findings from a case study examining the inputs, in-process, outputs, and impact/outcome of ASE in a university in Mozambique, an African low-income country. The article attempts to make visible specific patterns of ASE that occurs within the ecologies of knowledge in a country like Mozambique. However,  far away from being able to suggest context adequate indicators, this paper provides  instead insights into the qualities and patterns of ASE cooperation.

https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scaa055

Nelson Casimiro Zavale is currently an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and visiting scholar at INCHER-Kassel. He is Associate Professor of Sociology of Education and Higher Education Studies and Director of the Quality Assurance Office of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique.

Christian Schneijderberg (INCHER-Kassel) is a sociologist with the main areas of work in Higher Education and Science Studies and Sociology of Knowledge. At INCHER-Kassel he is coordinator of the research area "Innovation und Transfer". Currently, Christian  holds an acting professorship for "Sociology, Methods and Techniques of Empirical Social Research" at RWTH Aachen.