Little is known about social entrepreneurship across the African continent which Claeyé (2017 p.427) describes as “terra incognita”. Social entrepreneurship is a new and exciting field of academic study, which is dominated by Western perspectives. In 2018, a group of academics, led by KU Leuven, the University of Pretoria and Rutgers University hosted a session to strengthen research on social entrepreneurship in Africa at the University of Pretoria. The goal was to identify relevant avenues of research on social entrepreneurship in Africa, build initial partnerships and stimulate research to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon in the African continent.

 

The present research workshop represents an opportunity to continue incipient conversations and take them to a more practical level by forming research groups and developing research topics of interest into actionable research projects. This will be made possible by the guidance offered during the workshop by some senior academics and methodologists.

 

For PhD students, the workshop will be a platform to get valuable feedback on their work and to network with more senior academics in the field of social entrepreneurship.

 

 

To apply for the doctoral consortium, PhD students will submit an extended abstract of their latest work. During the doctoral consortium, PhD students will present their work and get feedback from one/two subject experts and one methodologist.

 

Upon registration, applicants will submit: their topics of interest, academic level, areas of expertise/strengths, access to data and, preferably, some research work/concept they would like to get collaborators for. The workshop organisers will then pre-match participants and form research groups based on the match between topics/expertise/access to data. This part of the workshop will be then dedicated to taking the research groups to completing a draft research document and framework, with short presentations by some of the workshop facilitators, work in research groups, and feedback to the group’s research mentor. On Day 3, the research groups will briefly present their research plan to the other workshop participants. The evening of Day 2 will also feature a networking evening among all the workshop participants.

 

This day is practice-oriented and devoted to interacting with social entrepreneurs. We plan to invite social entrepreneurs from a township context and meet them at the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi campus. The aim is to introduce the participants to the real-life challenges of social entrepreneurs in Africa.