African prosperity hinges on foundational conditions, UCT conference explores

A single question anchors the University of Cape Town’s second annual Wellbeing and Flourishing Conference: before flourishing can be achieved, what conditions keep it possible at all?

Scheduled for Friday, 30 October, at the New Lecture Theatre on UCT’s upper campus, the gathering is organised by the university’s Centre for Wellbeing and Flourishing. Its theme, “Flourishing Within and Beyond Fractures: Possibility, Connection and Well-being in a Changing World,” signals a deliberate shift from last year’s inaugural conference. Where that event established an interdisciplinary platform for conversations about individual wellbeing, this year’s edition widens the frame toward the structural, relational and institutional conditions that keep human possibility viable across personal, societal and continental dimensions.

Sean Abrahams, the Centre’s strategic founding lead and co-chair of the conference alongside Associate Professor Anita Campbell, draws a distinction that shapes the entire programme. “Flourishing asks what is being realised. Flourishability asks what remains viable,” he said. The difference matters. A student may be succeeding academically while the financial, relational or institutional supports underpinning that success grow increasingly fragile. Someone navigating serious difficulty, by contrast, may retain considerable future possibility where meaningful relationships, access and credible pathways forward remain intact. As Abrahams puts it: “Before flourishing can be achieved, sustained, or restored, it must remain possible.”

That framing sets up the opening keynote by Professor Shadrick Mazaza, honorary associate professor at UCT and a physician, philosopher and researcher whose work connects human transformation, leadership and health with African continental development. Through the African Consciousness Institute, Mazaza examines personal transformation and the maximisation of human potential as essential to Africa’s development and integration. His work speaks directly to the African Union’s Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, a vision of an integrated, prosperous and peaceful continent driven by its own citizens, with quality of life and wellbeing for all at its centre. His keynote poses the day’s foundational question: what is the relationship between the transformation of people and the transformation of the societies they are called upon to create? That question moves flourishing out of individual concern and into the terrain of participation, leadership, institutions and collective possibility.

Meanwhile, the conference closes with reflections from Professor Elelwani Ramugondo, UCT’s deputy vice-chancellor for People, Culture and Society. Ramugondo has previously argued that transformation understood as a humanising praxis can create “a sense of belonging, connect with ourselves and others, and share the gifts that we have.” Her closing remarks will turn the day’s outward-facing conversation about African futures back toward the university itself, raising a parallel institutional question: what kinds of environments enable people to belong, contribute and develop their possibilities?

Between those two anchoring addresses, the conference draws together perspectives from higher education, psychology, health, education, leadership, organisational life, sustainability, community engagement and student development. Contributions will span empirical research, conceptual work, practice-based innovation and reflective perspectives, creating space where established approaches meet emerging questions about belonging, participation and the environments people inhabit.

The theme’s wording is deliberate. To speak of flourishing within and beyond fractures is not to suggest that inequality, difficulty or institutional constraint can be overcome through individual positivity alone. It acknowledges, rather, that meaningful possibility must be actively preserved and created inside fractured contexts, not simply waited for on the other side of them.

For those considering contributing, the abstract submission deadline is 1 September 2026, with notification of outcomes on 8 September 2026. Abstracts and presenter registrations can be submitted through the conference registration process.

Whether the conversations at UCT’s upper campus on 30 October will help sharpen what “flourishability” demands of institutions, not just individuals, is the open question the day is designed to pursue.