CODESRIA’s institutional mandate is organised around the facilitation of research in the social sciences, broadly defined.  Within the framework of this mandate, the objectives that were defined for the Council when it was created centred on the promotion, by the example of its own work and through collaborative relations, of a holistic understanding of the historical and contemporary experiences that have shaped human life on the African continent both as a goal of research in its own right and as a condition for social transformation. In doing so, the specific research objectives that emerged over time and which continue to underpin the Council’s Research Programme to this day include:

1. The promotion and facilitation of social research and knowledge production in Africa using a multi-disciplinary approach that is capable of generating comprehensive insights and helping to combat the fragmentation of African scholars along various disciplinary, linguistic and geographical lines;
2. The constant expansion of the frontiers of knowledge production in and about Africa and the world by Africans, and the encouragement of the application of research-based knowledge to debates on public issues on the continent;
3. The promotion and defence of the principle and practice of the academic freedom of researchers in the production and dissemination of knowledge;
4. The encouragement of the development of African comparative research perspectives on problems affecting the continent;
5. An investment of attention in the production of historically-grounded knowledge that is, moreover, sensitive to the specificities of the contexts of and conditions for the development processes taking place in Africa;
6. The promotion of the publication and dissemination of the results of research undertaken by African scholars;
7. The strengthening of the institutional basis of knowledge production in Africa by proactively engaging and supporting other research institutions and their networks of scholars within its programmes of activities. As part of this goal, the Council also actively encourages cooperation and collaboration among African universities, research organisations and training institutions;
8. The encouragement of inter-generational and gender-sensitive dialogues in the African academy as a further investment of effort in the promotion of awareness of and capacity in the use of different perspectives for knowledge production; and 

9. The promotion of contacts and dialogue between African researchers and researchers working on Africa elsewhere in the world, as well as interaction between the Council and similar international organisations.  

The research objectives defined for the Council were occasioned as much by the numerous needs arising from the context of knowledge production in Africa as by the untenable situation in the aftermath of African independence whereby the agenda for African studies was largely fashioned outside the continent. In the face of the global asymmetry in knowledge production about Africa, research on the continent was not sufficiently integrated to generate independent, alternative interpretative analyses, fractured as it was along narrow disciplinary, geographical and linguistic lines. CODESRIA was to dedicate itself to challenge this fragmentation through the creation of thematic research networks that transcend disciplinary, geographical and linguistic boundaries. It also invested in the encouragement of the scholarly community to strive for the achievement of a more holistic understanding of the historical and contemporaneous experiences of the continent through multidisciplinary interventions that draw on a variety of traditions and approaches, integrate gender perspectives, and tap into the insights of different generations of scholars.

 

The Council also came to encourage African scholars to strive to undertake rigorous scholarly readings of developments in other regions of the world from the standpoint of Africa’s interests and needs, as well as the development challenges facing the continent.

The basic assumptions that informed the launching of the CODESRIA Research Programme remain as valid to this day as they were in 1973: There is no fatality about the African condition, and research, properly undertaken and deployed, can and should play a key role in the social transformation and development of the African continent – as, indeed, any other region of the world. African scholars, through their research output, can and are expected not only to contribute to the expansion of the frontiers of scientific knowledge but also the strengthening of the capacity within the continent to respond to the multifaceted challenges of development that confront society. The Council, therefore, mobilises support for research in the conviction that the primacy of knowledge, and the freedom to pursue and transmit it, are indispensable to progress and advancement of any society.

Component Elements of the CODESRIA Research Programme

Over the years, the different elements that make up the CODESRIA Research Programme have come to be classified into ‘Core Programmes’, ‘Special Initiatives’, and ‘Collaborative Initiatives’. General Conferences are also organized to achieve various ends from research stock-taking to agenda-setting. This classification serves mainly as the basis for the organization of the research work of the Council and not as rigid boundaries of activity demarcation. In practice, because the Research Programme is an integrated one, activity boundaries do overlap and even criss-cross in ways which underscore the inter-connectedness and dynamic interaction among different CODESRIA initiatives.    

Core Research Activities

These are research activities that are at the heart of the CODESRIA intellectual agenda. They are initiated and led by the Council, and comprise the different research vehicles or chapeaux that have become integral to institutional identity and modus operandi. In the actual implementation of the activities that make up the core programmes, the Council invariably draws on the collaboration of university-based researchers and institutes/centres.  

The core activities within the CODESRIA Research Programme include:

1. Green Books or specially commissioned research prospectus authored by one or more African scholars and meant to define broad research questions for further work on specific themes within the CODESRIA intellectual agenda;

2. Multinational Working Groups (MWGs), the flagship research vehicle of the Council through which multidisciplinary and inter-generational research teams drawing on scholars, male and female, from different geographic and linguistic zones are assembled to undertake academic research on a specific concern within the CODESRIA intellectual agenda;
3. National Working Groups (NWGs), a long-standing vehicle through which local, national-level research initiatives are supported by the Council, with the subjects submitted for consideration for support being determined locally by the country-based researchers themselves on the basis of their reading of local priority concerns, including under-studied or marginal issues. In other words, the subjects which are eligible for support within the NWG initiative do not necessarily have to feature among the core themes that make up the CODESRIA intellectual agenda;
4. Comparative Research Networks (CRNs), a more recent framework for mobilizing the African social research community to undertake comparative cross-country and multidisciplinary research within the established intellectual agenda of the Council;
5. Transnational Working Groups (TWGs), the instrument through which African social researchers are supported to carry out thematic multidisciplinary research in collaboration with researchers from other regions of the world, especially the global South;
6. The Gender Research Programme, adopted as a core activity by a resolution of the 8^th General Assembly held in 1995 that gender should be integrated into CODESRIA activities both in the mainstream of the work of the institution and as targeted interventions;
7. The Child and Youth Studies Programme, adopted in 2001 as a core activity following a resolution of the Executive Committee of the Council to invest more in the study of child and youth questions in the light of the demographics of the African continent;
8. The Economic Research Programme, the umbrella framework within which  much of the basic and policy research on economic issues is undertaken by the Council through the constitution of  multidisciplinary teams that integrate economists with other social researchers;
9. The Academic Freedom Programme, a long-standing chapeau within which all the research, advocacy and related interventions undertaken by the Council in the framework of its Charter mandate and the Kampala Declaration on Academic Freedom are organised; and

10. The African Humanities Programme, the specially-created framework through which work within the Humanities is undertaken, drawing on researchers from other fields of the social research. 

Special Initiatives:

1. The Lusophone Africa Initiative, introduced within the 2002 – 2006 Strategic Plan to serve as the main instrument for reaching the research communities in African countries using Portuguese as their official language that have been historically marginal in CODESRIA programming;

2. The CODESRIA Programme on Social History, undertaken specially in collaboration with SEPHIS as an intervention designed to encourage young historians and non-historians interested in the use of the historical method to carry out research on neglected themes in African social history.  

Collaborative Initiatives:

These are initiatives implemented by the Council in active collaboration with other research institutions. Specific activities under this umbrella are carried out over a defined period of time, sometimes running over several years. Some of the collaborative initiatives are set up as large programmes. The bigger and more prominent ones among them in which the Council has been involved since the beginning of the new millennium include the CODESRIA-CLACSO-APISA South-South Programme on Re-Thinking Development, Democratic Governance, and International Hegemony, the North-South West Africa-wide Consortium for Development Partnerships (CDP), the CODESRIA-Institut de Recherche sur le Developpement (IRD) programme on the Evolution of African Economies, Societies, Cities, States and Politics, and the CODESRIA-Organisation of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) programme of collaboration between scholars and trade unionists.

General Conferences

These are large meetings convened by the Council to focus on some strategic concerns of the day, such as the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), the Ivorian crisis, trends in African higher education, the Youth Question, and the challenges of building an Africa of citizens. They bring together some of the best scholars, policy makers and civil society activists on the issues concerned with a view to creating opportunities for the advancement of the frontiers of research and fostering mutual engagement among the different lead actors in African development. Occasionally, heads of state and government, and leaders of major regional and international organisations such as the African Union, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, ECOWAS and UNESCO are invited to serve as partners in the organisation of the more policy-oriented ones among the General Conferences.