CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Institutions of Higher Learning in Malaysia employ a number of mechanisms to promote community engagement. These include the establishment of the industry and community network division in research universities and Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) in 2007 to accelerate engagement with the community and industry. Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) has developed a new Critical Agenda Project (CAP) known as ‘Knowledge Transfer Programme’ (KTP). KTP recognises a broad range of activities to support mutually beneficial collaborations between universities, industries and communities (government agencies/Non Government Organizations (NGOs)/public sector). It provides the platform for the exchange of tangible and intangible intellectual property, expertise, learning and skills between academia, industry and the community. The forms of interactions may include joint research, consultancy, education, training, graduate development, conferences, sharing of physical facilities, student internship and staff placements. (KTP Policy, 2011).This move clearly shows that University-Community Engagement is given much importance in Institutes of Higher Learning in Malaysia as well as the government.
Problem Statement
Although there are increasing literature review or review papers on capacity building, there is a need to examine how does the capacity building theorized, developed and applied for sustained change. This is because there are still scarce research on community engagement (Le Clus, 2012) in general and community engagement framework in particular.
Furthermore, there is no guideline on approaches and definitions of university-community engagement. Subsequently, there is a lack of a national framework for university-community engagement and volunteerism in Malaysian Institutions of Higher Education. Not only that,
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