Think tank Opinor launched today
Opinor was launched in Centurion today. As a think tank, Opinor’s operations are focused on empowering communities in Africa to ensure sustainable survival.
“Opinor was created to develop and promote community-focused plans, strategies and policies through credible research and innovative communication which can be utilised to promote community self sufficiency in Africa. By adding value, we want to enable communities to make a significant difference on grass roots level,” says Barend Uys, Chief Executive of Opinor.
Ernst Roets, Head of Policy and Action at AfriForum, was appointed as the chairman of Opinor’s board. “Opinor differs from other think tanks in the sense that we don’t exist mainly to influence ideas. Opinor’s core function will be to do research that can be applied by institutions concerned with promoting communities’ interests and empowering them with the necessary knowledge and insight to take action that will lead to actual results. Opinor is therefore not focused only on winning its arguments, but to win with the actions that will result from its arguments,” says Roets.
Opinor is committed to the subsidiarity principle, which acknowledges that people are social beings by nature and emphasises the importance of community structures such as the family, the church and volunteer groups as institutions that enable an individual to serve the community and to connect with the community as a whole. “Opinor’s view is that people are not free-floating individuals but that they belong to communities. A person’s point of departure and underlying assumptions determine the solutions they come up with, and our approach will enable us to develop solutions that can be implemented with the realities faced by Africa and South Africa in mind,” says Uys.
Where other think tanks endeavour to make a difference mainly by influencing government policy, Opinor fills the void by focusing on enabling communities to improve their own living conditions. Visit www.opinor.org.
