George Ladaah Openjuru

This article explores the critical role of healthy community-university engagement in fostering transformative development and enhancing institutional vitality. It argues that universities must move beyond transactional outreach to embrace reciprocal, sustained partnerships with communities. Such engagement not only enriches experiential learning and research relevance but also positions universities as co-creators of knowledge and catalysts for inclusive change. The paper conceptualises ‘healthy engagement’ as a dynamic process rooted in mutual respect, shared goals, and epistemic justice, where community voices shape academic inquiry and institutional priorities. The article demonstrates how collaborative models of engagement contribute to community resilience, student empowerment, institutional credibility and the cultivation of humanity.

This chapter examines the unmet education needs of refugees with disabilities in accessing Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET). Using research conducted in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Uganda, it focuses on education experiences of refugees in Uganda to highlight the significant lack of provision in policy and practice. This situation is particularly alarming in the context of limited education and training opportunities and low school attendance in primary school despite increasing TVET policy and development interventions. The chapter uses critical capabilities theory and lifelong learning to reinforce the dual need to address the compounded barriers faced by refugees with disabilities in TVET and the need to develop learning pathways and educational transitions that support their life goals. In this narrative, we argue that the refugee policy has inherent structural limitations that limit education transition. We propose practical policy adaptations that promote inclusion and lifelong learning.

This article calls attention to the responsibility of universities to transform, through partnership, the community in which they are embedded. The authors suggest that, to find solutions to the various community challenges and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), universities need to engage in partnerships of knowledge co-creation with the community in ways that value local knowledge and experience. The article elaborates on the efforts of Gulu University Centre for Community Based Participatory Research and Lifelong Learning, located in Northern Uganda, to show the potential of co-constructing knowledge for community transformation. The centre is part of the Knowledge for Change (K4C) global consortium, which is a growing network for community-based research. The authors share three research stories of community-based research that reflect distinct challenges faced in Northern Uganda and effective community-engaged solutions. Through an exploration of the Acholi ontology and epistemology of interconnection, the authors demonstrate that local communities have the knowledge and experience to define and address local problems.

In this article, we examine how Christianity provides the impetus for local literacy practices in a rural community in Uganda. These Christian literacy practices form a central part of the literacy activities of the community and are manifested in a variety of contexts from public to private, using a wide variety of readily available religious texts in the community. Through examination of Christian literacy practices, the authors suggest that ethnographic research has the potential to generate information that can be used to enhance literacy learning in rural community life.