Researcher of the Month November: Simphiwe Swakamisa

Simphiwe (Cee) Swakamisa is a PhD student in the Centre for Religion and Public Life, in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, at the University of Leeds. In this interview, he tells about his research into faith-based social entrepreneurship, with a focus on South Africa.

Tell us a little about your ‘research journey’ – how did you get to where you are right now?

My research journey is summarised by the following quote ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans’. Prior to my “road to Damascus” moment, I was walking around the streets of Newcastle with a 5, 10 and 15-year plan. This entailed building a thriving legal practice before moving back to South Africa to start a new political party and one day run for office. Aptly enough, God’s been laughing ever since.

After graduating with a law degree, I gained professional experience in the legal, higher education and third sector. However, overtime, I became increasingly disillusioned with the dissonance resulting from working in corporate law and not feeling like I was making use of my interest in learning about the complex and systemic challenges that plague the African continent. Motivated by my desire to learn more about the structural underlying challenges and barriers that undermine the socio-economic development of impoverished communities and seek solutions to ending extreme poverty, Sub-Saharan Africa’s greatest developmental challenge, I decided to pursue doctoral study. As my degree was an integrated Masters, I was unable to obtain funding to seek out a Masters programme in the fields of religion and development. Realising I’d need to apply for a PhD programme in an entirely new field, I decided to work part-time and spend some months conducting independent researching which would enable to develop an initial understanding of the religion, development and social entrepreneurship literature and work on a research proposal for submission.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Who, or what, sparked your interest to work on your particular research area?

My frustrations with the high levels of extreme poverty in Africa, coupled with the difficulties faced by the international community in tackling complex social, economic and environmental challenges brought sharply into focus the inadequacies of the Western-led secularist development paradigm. As I read more around this, two pillars of interest stood out. These have since guided my journey towards my research focus on Faith-based Social Entrepreneurship (FBSE).

The first is that a consensus seemed to emerge amongst different government, business and civil society actors which was that the mainstream economic systems and organisational models that underpinned the international order were not conducive for the developing of inclusive and sustainable societies. This was evidenced by the fact that prior to Covid-19, 2073 was the earliest the Social Progress Imperative, a global non-profit, estimated that the world would meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The status quo was no longer tenable, and something needed to change. What came to the fore from my research was the need for transformational systems change. Transformational systems change can be understood as deep, systemic and sustainable change with large scale impact. As a result of the pioneering efforts of people and institutions, a new fourth sector of the economy, which combines the market-based approaches of the private sector with the social and environmental aims of the public and non-profit sector has begun to take prominence. Social enterprises are an example of a growing class of new organisation, gaining prominence in this new sector of the economy. More broadly, social entrepreneurship,  a global phenomenon that describes the people, ventures, and activities that innovate for social good has emerged as being key to the maximisation of social innovation and increased collaboration required for the tackling of systemic challenges such as ending extreme poverty and for realising a human centred and holistic transformational systems change which can drive the advancement of the SDGs.

The second pillar relates to the fact that within the African context, an overwhelming majority of Africans, 95 percent (Afrobarometer 2020) identity with a religion and perhaps most interestingly, that 'religious leaders are more widely trusted and less widely seen as corrupt than any other group of public leaders (Howard, 2020: 2). However, despite the high incidence of religious participation, and the important role that faith plays in the socio-political, cultural and economic lives of Africans, within the discourses and practices of the secularist western-led development paradigm, religious ideas, values, institutions and communities have long been grossly unexplored in the development mission of making poverty history. Today, the relationship between religion and development is becoming an increasingly germane area of enquiry in development scholarship and practice. This newfound appreciation of the contributions of religious actors, chimes with a firm belief that I’ve always had, that the fate of the continent’s development trajectory rests upon greater engagement, both from a scholarly and practice-based perspective, with arguably the continent’s most overlooked resource; its people and their faith. Reducing religious illiteracy in Africa, for example, should be a crucial developmental concern especially in multi-faith and multi-ethnic communities as misunderstandings and ignorance of religious beliefs, practices and doctrines can give rise to the co-opting of religion for political gains, fuel religious extremism, limit human rights and individual freedoms and be utilised in the proliferation of sectarian and ethnic conflicts. All these negative aspects and use of religion majorly impede the fight to end extreme poverty and without address will ensure the failure of sustainable development in Africa.

My research focus on FBSE which is defined as ‘an expression of social entrepreneurship enacted in a distinctive context of religious faith’ (Borquist 2020:1), brings together these two pillars of interests. By advancing a critical analysis of FBSE in the South African context and exploring how it can contribute to the aims of SDG 1: No Poverty, an important contribution of my project will be the development of a theoretical framework for the use of FBSE as a platform for participatory and inclusive multistakeholder partnerships focusing on tackling multidimensional poverty.

What are you currently, or about to start, working on?

My project adopts a qualitative research approach employing three main methodologies, a case study research design, ethnographic fieldwork and grounded theory. My research project will be set out in two distinct stages. The first encompasses the completion of the case studies. The second stage references the process of theory generation using grounded theory. I am currently in the first stage which has three distinct phases:

• Desk based and on the ground mapping exercise – I am currently conducting an online search of the different kinds of organizations engaged in socially entrepreneurial activities (e.g. socially entrepreneurial organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), faith-based non-profits such as churches and charities operating for-profit ventures etc) as a broad mapping exercise in order to develop a preliminary typology of organizations engaged in FBSE. This will be supplemented by an on the ground exploration of organisations and individual practitioners of FBSE who may be operating within the informally sector without traditional formal infrastructure such as a legally registered organization or website.
• Initial exploratory interviews – Once a preliminary typology of the different kinds of organizations and individuals practicing FBSE is established, I will conduct semi-structured interviews with leaders, stakeholders and beneficiaries of the different categorized organizations and individuals engaged in FBSE.
• In-depth ethnographic case studies – Lastly, I will complete an in-depth case study on one organization/individual from each category of the typology whilst also employing additional research methodologies such as participant observation. I will also be sourcing information from stakeholders of these selected organizations such as beneficiaries, policy makers, civil society organizations and academics in order to address my research questions.

In what way(s) do you feel your research examines the role of religion in public life and the relationship between the two?

The relationship between Religion, Development and Social Entrepreneurship is yet to be explored meaningfully in either the academic or professional domain. Additionally, how the context of religion influences social entrepreneurship is not well understood, even though religious beliefs have been found to influence entrepreneurial spirit and business practices. My multidisciplinary study on FBSE therefore offers an opportunity to address a lack of academic or empirical research on how the context of religion can influence social entrepreneurship in the South African context.

As FBSE is a multi-dimensional, contextually embedded phenomenon whose enactment is shaped by the particular social, cultural, political, economic, geographic and historical environment in which it occurs (de Bruin & Lewis 2015; de Bruin & Teasdale, 2019), capturing the efforts of practitioners of FBSE operating within both the formal and informal sector will be important to build a more comprehensive picture of FBSE in the South African context and will help further knowledge and theory building of how religion as a contextual factor influences the processes and enactment of FBSE and the internal workings of a variety of different organisation.

As well as shining a spotlight on how religious organisations and individuals make distinctive contributions to development and service, an important contribution of my research will be to explore how religious social capital can be integrated meaningfully in development projects and community led initiatives. This is because within the development literature it is now acknowledged that religion’s ability to build social cohesion and social capital plays an important role in socio-economic development, ‘through for example greater attention to trust and community relations, through leadership that is perceived as clean and committed through local roots and sources of accountability and through a commitment to values compatible with democratisation, good governance and other forms of sustainability, as well as participation’ (Bompani 2015: 106).

Finally, within the emergent research field on religion and development there is growing acknowledgement that whilst greater engagement with religion by international development actors is a good thing, there is a risk of religion being instrumentalized to serve only secular development agendas. In other words, religious communities are only seen as actors of  ‘mainstream development policies and programmes’ (van Wensveen 2011, 82). My project therefore aims to bring to the fore alternative notions of development informed by contextual religious and cultural worldviews, contributing also to debates of how religion can contribute to the decolonisation of development.