CENLED’s director serves as: – Chairperson of the Economic Development Council of South Africa. – Council member of the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). – Official member of the Community of Practice for Entrepreneurial Universities of EDHE. – Reviewer: Journal in Urban and Regional Planning (JURP), University of the Philippines School of Urban and Regional Planning (UP SURP). USDP Project: The South Africa/United Kingdom Doctoral Project. The main purpose of the project is to support academics and professional staff at South African universities to undertake and complete doctoral studies within a period of four years or less. CENLED established a doctoral training academy in partnership with the University of Glasgow (u21 partner) and the University of Zululand. In this project, only permanent university staff members were recruited in the following research fields: local development; entrepreneurship; sustainable development goals 1, 2 and 4; education and fourth industrial revolution technologies that will support municipalities in local development to improve the quality of lives of communities. An innovative collaborative supervisory model was developed. In terms of this model the supervisors from the three universities are working in teams, and include an experienced supervisor, co-supervisor and early career researcher or novice supervisor to supervise a team of three to four PhD candidates, to ensure that supervisory capacity is developed. CENLED presented numerous conference papers and research activities that involves societal impact, sustainability, innovation and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) included CENLED’s fourth and fifth scholarly books in the CENLED scholarly book series. The role of entrepreneurial ecosystems in sustainable local economic development, Centre for Local Economic Development: Topics in Local Development Series, vol. 4. Local economic development: Innovation, new technology and green economies, Centre for Local Economic Development: Topics in Local Development Book Series, vol. 5. Prof Paulo Ferreira, Prof Fernando Rebola, Prof Rui Alexandre Castando, CENLED partners from Portugal and Sustainable Development Congress collaborators 60 College of Business and Economics | Annual Report 2025
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