Business school aims at the real world
Socioeconomic problems leading to frustrating lack of skilled people on the continent
BUSINESSES around the world fear they will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities opening up in Africa for want of skills, global and local surveys have shown.
Quoting a study by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released in June this year, Prof Walter Baets, director of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (GSB), says CEOs of large companies across 68 countries are concerned about the skills pool needed to expand in Africa.
The PwC survey of 1,300 CEOs found that 96% expressed doubt about the availability of skilled people on the continent. That is borne out by a World Bank estimate, suggesting that 2.5-million more engineers and technicians are required to achieve Africa’s key development targets.
These statistics raise questions for business education in Africa, he says.
“Who is being trained, where and how? And why are not enough people gaining the necessary skills to be effective in Africa? The answers, from a business school perspective, are far from straightforward.”
Baets says the skills shortage is linked to socioeconomic problems such as poverty, unemployment, lack of access to running water and basic services, poor infrastructure as well as poor primary and secondary education.
In SA the Institute of Municipal Finance Officers estimates that 73% of positions including municipal managers, chief financial officers and supply chain managers are not filled at local government level. And the Institute of Security Studies estimates that there are at least five protests in the country each day reflecting public frustration around poor service delivery and other poverty-related issues.
“At the same time, the continent is hungry for investment and primed for development. African economies have grown 5% a year over the past few years and the World Bank predicts that average growth will reach 7% growth by 2016,” says Baets.
He points out two constraints. “(First), not many individuals in emerging market economies have access to the kind of finances required to study the necessary business courses at top business schools. This is increasingly being addressed by the rise in online learning options and other innovative ways of delivering education to more people. According to research from the Association of MBAs, online learning has been identified as one of the leading emerging business education trends.
“The other problem is that, no matter through what medium, business schools are potentially teaching students the wrong things.”
At the recent Africa conference of the European Foundation for Management Development in Dakar the theme was “Are we miseducating our students?”
“Delegates seemed to agree that entrepreneurship (the creation of one’s own company) was not something that could be taught and that introducing entrepreneurship at university or business school might be entirely too late,” says Baets. “Rather than trying to teach entrepreneurship, we could do our economies a lot of good by training our students in entrepreneuring — fostering an attitude orientated towards taking action, responsibility and developing projects with a clear focus on business model innovation. Lecturers need to showcase to students how business, if entrepreneurial and innovative, can contribute towards a thriving economy.”
There is already a lot of entrepreneurial energy in Africa, says Baets. “The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the world’s largest longitudinal study of entrepreneurship, illustrates the entrepreneurial landscape in sub-Saharan Africa is on the increase and African economies are booming. Several countries are stepping up entrepreneurial activity and moving beyond survivalist entrepreneurship towards exploiting opportunities in these markets.”
However, he says, there is a growing belief worldwide, not only in the world of business, but also at business schools, that running a successful business does not only mean running a profitable business.
As Harish Manwani, chief operating officer of Unilever, says, companies cannot afford to be just innocent bystanders in what’s happening around them. They have to play their role by serving the communities which sustain them. “We have to move to an and/and model. Which is how do we make money and do good. How do we make sure that we have a great business, but we also have a great environment about us.”
In these contexts, says Baets, business as usual is not going to be an option. Africa needs something different if it is to meet its development challenges. A broader focus on values and ethics, on sustainability and inclusivity means companies and business people need to look at the value their companies are bringing to communities and people. They need to ask: if we ceased to exist tomorrow, what would the world lack?
“A key part of the new entrepreneuring mind-set that business schools should seek to foster must therefore be a sense of values and ethics. Entrepreneurs can be encouraged to develop business ideas for social innovation, using business and the power of business thinking to solve social and environmental problems.
“The UCT Graduate School of Business encourages this mind-set through its teaching and research but also through practical initiatives such as its newly launched Solution Space (aimed at) stimulating innovation and to pioneer workable solutions to Africa’s social and environmental challenges,” says Baets.
“Another is the Social Franchising Accelerator, which was established at the UCT GSB Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship in partnership with the International Centre for Social Franchising. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the initiative is a unique academic-NGO-private sector partnership and will help meet the needs of poor and vulnerable people across SA by supporting and scaling up successful social impact organisations,” he says.
A third initiative, the Social Innovation Lab (SI Lab), featured in the UN Global Compact’s Inspirational Guide for the Implementation of Principles for Responsible Management Education.
“The SI Lab is a stream of the MBA, which immerses students, both practically and theoretically, in the field of social innovation allowing them to specialise in that field which is also an entrepreneurial development programme, which means students get to work with a viable entrepreneurial business during their studies.
“This is the kind of direction business schools in emerging market economies must be looking at more,” says Baets. “Instead of focusing narrowly on curricula and course material, students should be exposed to as much of the real world as possible, and invited to participate in uplifting communities through innovative projects and programmes.”