Xolani Dlamini
The current year of 2024, leading to 2025 proves potential for CAPSI to continue contributing to the body of knowledge in various research areas of philanthropy and social investment across Africa and abroad, with new endeavours and different interpretations of the field.
In response to perceived challenges faced by early career academics when looking to submit and publish their work, CAPSI in collaboration with various organisations and publishers, will be hosting a continuation of a series of in-person events and webinars that focus on academic publishing for emerging researchers. Each webinar looks at a different topic, covering all one needs to know about academic publishing. The series aims to provide expert advice on a broad range of publishing themes. This includes but is not limited to: learning how to prepare an academic paper; understanding editorial processes and decisions; peer review processes and preparing manuscripts for publication once accepted.
The Centre launched the Research Reports Spotlight Series, which covers reports that tackle various expressions of philanthropy across the continent. The series aims to facilitate a deeper learning and analysis of each of the research reports, thus generating knowledge, content and raising awareness. The main objectives for these events/webinars are to create conversations and engagements to expand on the report’s methodology and findings so that the research and its recommendations can be further disseminated in video, audio, written and infographic formats. We owe a deep gratitude to all the authors who published their reports and accepted our invitation to participate and present their findings with the wider community.
As part of the Research Reports Series, we will publish several reports resulting from research studies conducted by Emerging Scholars. These reports document various topics such as philanthropy, climate change and sustainability.
There are numerous research undertakings commissioned by the Centre in partnership with different partners. One of them is a collaboration between CAPSI and Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo that produced a report focusing on good practices and lessons from nonprofit organisations and cooperative partnership programmes.Another partnership with the Wits School of Governance produced a book titled “African Philanthropy: Philanthropic Responses to COVID-19 and Development Goals in Africa” that was published last year by Edward Elgar Publishing. We have another book project on barriers to civil society that we hope to publish in 2025.
The contributions of the nonprofit sector to African economies project conducted research studies in 17 countries in Africa focusing on the contribution of the nonprofit sector to the creation of dignified and fulfilling work for young people in Africa. This has produced various reports, including the methodology toolkit, synthesis report and country reports in more than ten African countries. The Centre is in the process of finalising and publishing the reports in various formats, including a collated volume or special issue.
The International Review of Philanthropy and Social Investment (IRPSI) is an open-access interdisciplinary, international journal for cutting- and leading-edge primary research on philanthropy and social investment. It is aimed at academic and research communities, exploring the emergent and developing fields of philanthropy and social investment in Africa and beyond.
Another set of publications will be from the Resilient Urban Communities Project (RUC), a partnership with the University of Münster, Strathmore University and our Centre. Authors explore different themes that include African civil society, social entrepreneurship, and philanthropy through the lens of economics, social sciences, nonprofit, or development studies. The submitted papers are currently under review, and we anticipate publishing this special issue during the first quarter of 2025.
Emerging from the African Philanthropy Conference that took place in Victoria Falls in July 2024, the IRPSI journal will publish a special issue from the academic conference proceedings.
Over the past few years, one of our biggest challenges has been to build a strong and credible pool of reviewers to be used across our many publications to ensure quality control and high standards. We have started contracting about a dozen reviewers, entering into a two-year agreement with many, hoping to increase our turnaround times during the review process.
We have strengthened our efforts to increase accessibility and enhance discoverability of the Centre’s content across all platforms to support findability in external platforms and databases, and allow for machine-generated connections of content. This is in line with our long-term strategic advancements to produce credible publications and work our way to full accreditation.
