About us

The South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) is a strategically focused knowledge and human resource intervention into the South African Higher Education system that was established through a parliamentary dispensation and is funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology. Its core mandate is to advance the frontiers of knowledge through focused research in identified fields or problem areas, and create new research career pathways for highly skilled, high quality young and mid-career researchers, as well as stimulate strategic research across the knowledge spectrum.

Established in January 2008, the DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Development Education is funded by the Department of Science and Technology, administered by the National Research Foundation and is hosted by the University of South Africa (UNISA), which has positioned itself as “the African University in the service of humanity”.

The Chair introduces a new pedagogy in academic research and citizenship education which takes which takes development and the acute lessons drawn from it as a pedagogic field and human development as the goal. Its exploration through research, post-graduate teaching, and community engagement seeks answers to some of the most taxing and exciting questions about development, knowledge production and science.

It asks the questions:

• What kind of transformative actions must be brought to bear to enable both restorative action and sustainable human development to occur in Africa and elsewhere?
• How can key areas of disciplinary knowledge production (such as science, economics, education and law) be reconstituted in order to bring about a just and human-centred development on the continent?

Development Education reframes human development and systems transformation within a paradigm of restorative action and cognitive justice. Through:

• Meta-capacity building for systems level transformation,
• Transdisciplinarity,
• Exploring the methodologies in second level indigenization and
• Postgraduate training it addresses the serious capacity chasms in detecting social and knowledge capital of African people, strengthen their capability to conceptualize and contextualize these into policy issues; and translate them at the point of implementation.
• It further facilitates, through research and strategic interventions, the re-examination of ideas, norms and practices at all levels in the academy in its relationship to African society.