College of Law and Management Studies

Professor Vhonani Olive Netshandama is the founding Director of Community Engagement, Entrepreneurship, Inclusive Innovation and Commercialisation (CEEIIC) at the University of Venda (UNIVEN), which is a progressive integrated ecosystem space of convergence for the university to disrupt the silos and enhance the third mission and public good. With over two decades of experience in higher education and more than 15 years in senior leadership, she is a leading scholar-practitioner advancing transformative, socially responsive universities, particularly within rural and historically marginalised contexts.

Her work is grounded in participatory action research, decoloniality, and knowledge democracy, emphasising co-learning, co-creation, and equitable partnerships between universities, communities, government, and industry. She has contributed significantly to redefining community engagement as a core academic function, integrating teaching, research, innovation, entrepreneurship, and societal impact. Professor Netshandama’s scholarship has evolved from documenting engagement practices to providing conceptual leadership on societal impact, evaluation, and epistemic justice. She challenges extractive engagement models and advances relational, reflexive, and community-centred approaches, with a strong emphasis on Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as a foundation for inclusive development and higher education transformation.

Her recent work foregrounds inclusive entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems as critical pathways for addressing inequality and disrupting extractive development paradigms. She advocates for community-based enterprises, social entrepreneurship, and benefit-sharing models that enable meaningful community participation in knowledge economies. This aligns with national and continental priorities on sustainability, inclusive growth, and transformation. A DST Distinguished Woman Scientist (Social Sciences), Professor Netshandama is also a Certified Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative (ELI) facilitator and an alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Innovation Leadership Bootcamp. She has led and participated in numerous interdisciplinary collaborations across community engagement, public health, and social innovation.

Professor Netshandama has successfully supervised over 20 doctoral and 30 master’s students, mentoring and coaching hundreds of undergraduate students on critical cross-field competencies, as well as a new generation of scholars in community engagement, entrepreneurship, and inclusive innovation. She has published a number of publications with the team and with mentees.