2025 Public Engagement with Research Award

Leila Patel is a distinguished professor of social development studies at the Centre for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg. Her research interests cover a broad spectrum of social issues including social welfare policy, social protection, socio-economic rights and democracy, gender, care, the social services and children, youth and families. Her work has been influential in the development of social welfare policy in South Africa, particularly regarding marginalised and vulnerable groups and in driving systemic change and empowering communities.

Not only is she committed to producing quality, relevant, innovative, applied and strategic research to solve pressing societal problems, she places great emphasis on producing high quality communication and the dissemination of scientific evidence to improve people’s lives. Careful attention is paid to distilling key messages from the research findings and communicating these in accessible formats for different target groups.

Scientific engagements are produced in accessible formats via the media—print, broadcast, social media and community outreach—in order to amplify the impact of the research. In this way the findings serve to feed into debates, thinking and actions relevant to national development and global goals such as the SDGs relating to reducing poverty, hunger, and inequality including the promotion of gender equality. The objective is to make the research accessible to a wider audience, and to build public awareness of the work. She and her colleagues penned 27 articles for The Conversation which garnered close to 440 000 reads in 2025. Her research on socio-economic rights and voting behaviour reached millions of people over the five surveys conducted between 2020 and 2024.

As the principal investigator of the National Research Foundation-supported study entitled Community of Practice for Social Systems Strengthening to Improve Child Wellbeing Outcomes, the gap between research and practice in social service delivery models for early grade learners could be bridged through a process of continuous improvement. Besides assessing and delivering tailored interventions for 160 children and families in urban schools in Gauteng, the CoP model was also applied successfully in a rural setting in Moutse, Grobblersdal which saw 87 children receive tailored interventions that included home visits, vaccinations and nutrition screenings among others. In addition, parenting workshops were held for participant families. The CoP’s community radio campaigns reached 66 000 listeners in Moutse and 250 000 in Ivory Park, Gauteng.

The CoP research produced a comprehensive multidimensional dataset and a digital tool for longitudinal child wellbeing assessments that could be applied in both rural and urban settings to track and improve child wellbeing outcomes. Two CoP symposia attracted more than 500 participants, and media engagements about the study reached diverse audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands of people. These examples of scientific engagement underscore her commitment to science communication to scale up the social impact of the study.

She obtained a Master’s in social work in social policy, social planning, and administration from Western Michigan University in the USA and a PhD in social welfare policy for a post-apartheid society from the University of the Witwatersrand. She was South Africa’s first Director-General for welfare and population development and served for a period in the Mandela government. Leila returned to academia in 1998 first as Wits University’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-Principal, and later as the DSTI-NRF Research Chair in Welfare and Social Development from 2016 to 2022. She is the founding director of the Centre for Social Development in Africa and is the recipient of numerous international and national awards including the NRF Women in Science Award in 2014 and the ASSAf Gold Medal Science for Society Award. She has a B1 rating from the NRF.