Outreach for good governance
ENTERPRISES with a governance and transformation agenda to pursue and sustain over the long term find they have a vast terrain to cover. They have to start with their own internal core processes, and then move over to the supply and value chains of which they form a part, both at the sector and regional level. Serving as a capstone, there is also governance at the national level, where transformative outcomes are sorely needed, and to which they have to make a contribution.
As they cover such a vast terrain, these enterprises can never lose sight of the core agenda, and it is to spread good governance practices and the observance of responsible citizenship far and wide. The wider the spread and the deeper (as well as more operative) the observance, the better the cause of good governance is served in our land.
It is in this light that an outreach pitched to many other entities for the cause of good governance should always be front and center of initiatives propelled by a deep sense of “civic duty” and “social responsibility.” In what more specific and concrete ways may such an outreach for good governance be undertaken?
• Values formation initiatives. These initiatives are absolutely vital, and the values to be promoted are those that most favour the observance of good governance practices. These initiatives cannot be limited to the “teach and preach” variety; they have to go down to practical and concrete levels where individuals, teams, and families get to observe at ground level the specific demands of governance, i.e. personal, institutional, and social.
• Skills training and expertise certification programs. Governance keeps reminding us that everyone has to keep on upgrading skills and moving up the expertise ladder in order to keep up with the demands of the times and of other changing circumstances. Moreover, the need to actually do so is not limited to the “untrained few”; it actually applies to all. Everyone should be very conscious of the imperative to reinvent oneself every 5 years or so; if we do no train ourselves for new skill sets and prepare for higher expertise levels all the time, we would soon be left behind.
• Social enterprise development. Governance also insists that we cannot be a country of mere employees (although there is absolutely nothing wrong about being an employee); many more of us, however, will need to be so enterprising as to actually set up and bring to full economic ma- turity a number of enterprises. They may be small or medium-scale; they may be specialist enterprises or ones that supplygeneral goods and services to other enterprises. In every case, they have to be made viable; and such viability will need to be secured over a long period of time. This means that such enterprises would need continuing attention and support; they need to be continuously promoted and their different needs at different stages and times effectively served.
Again, these are big-picture possibilities. They need to be brought down and focused to specific times and places. Moreover, no single enterprise can pursue these possibilities by themselves. They need effective, institutional partners, which can smoke out the details and focus on the nitty-gritty.
This is where schools come in. In every big area or region, there are tertiary-level institutions that can become the anchors for these programs: continuing values formation; continuing skills training and ladder-type certification programs; incubation of social enterprises appropriate to the circumstances of the area or region. These are the “schools” that can be co-opted to be in the forefront of outreach initiatives for good governance in any given area or region. All they need is effective support and strong encouragement from governance enterprises.
Within a region, a governance enterprise need not look farther than the most socially committed tertiary education institution located in the area.