**7.1 Conclusions drawn from the study**

The conclusions emanating from the study were drawn from its focus areas, which are as follows:

The review of the five-year strategic plan of each surveyed university with a particular focus on its ability to prescribe the university's community engagement strategic goals and objectives, which are supported by a reasonable financial plan. On the other hand, support for community engagement initiatives and targets from the university management has been mixed. While there is evidence that support is lacking in some cases, it can also be concluded that there is sufficient willingness among some university management to support community engagement initiatives and targets. This study concludes that community engagement is clearly defined and therefore clearly understood by stakeholders. The clear definition of what community engagement entails and the willingness of the university management to support the cause of community engagement through the provision of leadership reveal some level of strain for implementation. There are notable complexities and challenges in that there is a general lack of clearly developed strategic goals to facilitate meaningful community engagement initiatives and targets. Where there is evidence of lack of proper support from the university leadership on community engagement, pointers are that there was a lack of funding and provision of human resources to aid community engagement initiatives and targets.

The focus of this study was also on the ability of the university to align the annual report with the strategic plan. It is concluded that in some cases, universities prioritised other key performance areas of their operations such as Teaching and Learning and Research, for example at the expense of community engagement initiatives and targets. The majority of the universities provided audited or quantified their outputs on Teaching and Learning and Research for example, but these audits have often excluded community engagement. The prioritisation of Teaching and Learning and Research over community engagement in some universities reveals that there was a poor alignment of the universities' strategic plans with their intended outputs as measured in the universities' key performance focus areas. The reports reflect these patterns. For example, this study observed that the 2020 annual reports lacked clear outputs on community engagement, whereas these reports only revealed some wishful indications on the improvement of funding for community engagement for example. However, observations conclude that it is not all doom and gloom for South African universities. At the two top universities that were observed for the purpose of this study, there is a clear alignment of community engagement with service learning, professional services, global engagement, public engagement, development of partnerships and international academic collaboration/cooperation as evidence that community engagement in these universities remained a high priority.
