Business Daily (Nairobi)
J. H. Kimura
3 July 2008
opinion
In the last three years or so, a subtle change has been taking place in management education and training in Africa and in Kenya.
The first of these and probably the catalyst to some of the developments was "an experiment" by an IFC economist called Guy Pfeffermann based in New York. Guy thought that African management education needed a kickstart to put it on the same pedestal as the great western business schools. So he got IFC to fund a small project on writing business cases which could be used in teaching graduate students, entrepreneurs and managers.
To get the project going, he picked on three business schools in Africa - Lagos Business School in Nigeria (entrepreneurship), USIU in Kenya (cases) and Gordon Institute of Business Science (Teaching the Practice of Management).
His business model was simple. He argued that teaching business using cases or methods developed for Harvard, Stanford and Columbia business schools was okay for Americans but did not make sense for Africa where the environment is vastly different. So he got these schools to identify several success stories in their countries on which to write cases.
To assist them, he picked three professors from business schools in the West (Murray Low from Columbia, John Mullins from London and Barbara Jamieson from Edinburgh) to mentor young lecturers to write world class cases based on local experiences. He had, as an IFC expert, realised the rich context that Africa provides.
Among the first eight cases were well known companies: Safaricom, Kenya Airways, Bidco Industries, Mabati Rolling Mills, Firestone, Commercial Bank of Africa. The rest, to use a cliche, is virtually history.
The most unique aspect of the new case training approach was getting high energy executives like Michael Joseph, Titus Naikuni, Vimal Shah, Manu Chandaria and Isaac Awuondo to actually sit in a class where their respective cases were being discussed and to answer any awkward questions that might arise in the course of the heated debate between the students and the mwalimu!
To-date, some 26 cases have been written at USIU and they are hosted at the European Case Clearing House (EECH) in London for the world to read. The target is to do a total of 100 cases in the next few years so as to enrich the selection.
The second initiative that Guy started was a global network of business schools that had the interests of the developing world at heart. So far, this network has attracted a crop of over 32 schools among whom are the best known business schools in the world. In Africa, four business schools are members - GIBS and University of Cape Town, Lagos Business School and USIU in Kenya.
These four schools were expected to provide the much required transformational leadership in management education in Africa and, to their credit, were the founders of the African Association of Business Schools (AABS) which now boasts 17 African schools. They have held their four annual workshops on the Teaching of the Practice of Management, the last being at USIU in May this year in which over 70 lecturers from Africa were trained by renowned professors.
By a unique coincidence, Global Business Schools Network (GBSN) based in Washington D.C. had decided that they were going to have their annual meeting in Nairobi in July 2008. Their high profile meeting will be at the USIU campus and will be attended by dons from over 30 universities in the world.
During the same function, Guy's Management Education and Research Consortium (MERC) has invited some 40 or so business leaders in the country to come and exchange ideas, share expectations and ideals with business school dons.
And this, to me, is the crux of the matter: that western universities are no longer turning up their noses at Africa but are, in fact, actively seeking partnerships that were unthinkable several years ago.
Indeed, some of them such as Columbia and MIT in the US and IMD in France, are actively seeking collaborating institutions in Africa. And they are not coming alone. For instance, Goldman Sachs International, the well known global investment bank, has committed itself to spending $100 million dollars in the next five years to train 10,000 women leaders in the developing world using a combination of local and international talent.
So what does all this interest in African management education harbinger? To my mind, it is a rather belated acceptance that Africa, in spite of its myriad problems, has something to offer - by way of business, resources and even professionals.
As The Economist recently editorialised while praising Safaricom's Michael Joseph: "Since 70 per cent of (Kenya's) economy is informal and government services are ragged, there is probably some truth in his claim that Safaricom has done more to help Kenya than decades of aid. At the very least, it offers a powerful lesson for would-be investors in Africa: it can pay to bet on the poor."
This is a welcome change.
Prof Kimura teaches finance at USIU.
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