‘Man on a mission’ for education
Karodia gets award for transforming education system
PROFESSOR Yusuf Karodia has received the African Leadership Person of the Year Award for education and development, for a second consecutive year.
The award acknowledges Karodia as Africa’s greatest visionary in the development of education.
Karodia, who founded the distance learning institutions Regent Business School and Mancosa, received the award from Dr Ken Giami, the publisher of the African Leadership magazine.
Giami acknowledged Karodia’s enduring legacy and visionary contributions on Saturday, during the African Leadership Magazine Persons of the Year Awards in Joburg.
“At a time of deepening rot in the education system of several African states, we see in Professor Karodia a man on a mission to salvage our educational system.
“We are very pleased with his contributions as he continues to set the pace in transforming higher education across the continent,” said Giami.
According to africanleadership.co.uk, the annual event showcases and celebrates Africa’s finest business, political and diplomatic leaders who contribute to the continent’s growth and development.
Each year, the magazine issues two major calls as a prelude to this particular award; a call for nomination and a call for voting.
Karodia, of Durban, emerged the winner in the polls for education and development.
In a recent tribute to Karodia, media consultant and social commentator Yogan Devan said Karodia had spent over two decades founding and guiding Mancosa to become a leading higher education institution in Southern Africa.
Now he has immersed himself in philanthropic work in the education sector among disadvantaged communities through the Yusuf Karodia Foundation.
Karodia launched the Million Books Project, which aims to provide more than a million books to schoolchildren across South Africa through mobile libraries.
“Research has shown that access to libraries improves learner performance and increases their chances of success. A literate, educated society is a safer, healthier and more prosperous society,” said Karodia in an interview at the time.
Karodia has also spent the past four decades pursuing new avenues to make quality education accessible to more people in sub-Saharan Africa.
At the weekend’s event, he cautioned that to sustainably address the challenges posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, policymakers and education advocates in Africa needed to embrace new, digitally-immersive methods in higher education.
He said traditional approaches to higher education were fast becoming irrelevant amid rapid global digitisation.
Karodia said a sustainable, long-term solution to the continent’s education crunch lay in empowerment through relevant education by tapping into the demands by an increasingly digitised workplace and society.
“It is critical to acknowledge that the higher education sector, in its current form, will soon be of less relevance in the rapidly-changing global workspace.
“As more companies adopt artificial
SPONSORED FEATURE intelligence, disruptive and exponential technologies, rendering some tasks and positions obsolete, it is imperative that higher education institutions modify their knowledge-exchange systems.
“This will empower students with the expertise and skills that are needed in a digitally-transformed workplace.”
He said changing steps on how we imparted skills and knowledge to a digital-savvy generation was crucial to driving success in higher education.
“We need an education system that is forward-looking, agile and responsive to rapidly changing labour market needs.
“This means up-skilling and re-skilling lecturers, as well as redesigning the education systems and curricula to allow for agility and adaptability.
“We must tear down the barriers that exist between education and the real world.
“We must bring the working world into education a lot earlier and take education into the working world.”
Karodia began his career in 1973 as a schoolteacher.
In 1988, after completing his Master of Education degree at Unisa, he became a lecturer in educational management and comparative
ABOVE: Professor Yusuf Karodia received the International African Leadership Person of the Year Award for educational development at the weekend.
LEFT: Books galore; one of Karodia’s altruistic projects. |
education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). In the same year, Karodia was a research fellow on a British Council scholarship for the University of Manchester in the UK.
In 1990, he was awarded the Fulbright scholarship and the Education Opportunities Council Faculty Fellowship at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He conducted research, on his doctoral programme on management issues pertaining to non-governmental organisations, at Illinois University.
Karodia was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1992 from the University of Pretoria.
During his tenure at UKZN, he attended national and international conferences, representing the university on the national education crisis committee.
Spurred by the socio-political injustices he witnessed and experienced in his early years during apartheid, particularly the denial of tertiary education to black students, Karodia established two private higher education institutions to empower the youth with affordable, quality, supported distance learning education for the previously marginalised.
Regent Business School and Mancosa continue his legacy.