Chantelle Benjamin
25 November 2008
Johannesburg — SA's poor education standards were going to hinder the country's efforts to become one of the leading emerging markets, a top economist has warned.
T-Sec chief economist Mike Schussler last week presented the MasterCard Worldwide Centres of Commerce Emerging Market Index, which showed that Johannesburg ranked 11th out of 65 leading cities driving growth in 30 emerging markets.
Schussler, who contributed research to the survey , said SA was next in line after India, Russia, China and Brazil as an emerging market, but not for long unless education standards were raised dramatically.
As another group of matrics completed year-end exams amid teacher shortage concerns and questions about the effectiveness of outcomes-based education, Schussler said SA's education system offered little hope of addressing the skills shortage.
"If we want to enter the knowledge economy, it is something we are going to have to address," Schussler said.
"We cannot afford to lower standards in a competitive world environment if we want to create employment."
He said SA had consistently come last in global studies on literacy and reading, maths and science in the past 12 years, with Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Morocco and Tunisia outperforming it.
The number of South Africans finishing school was also below the norm compared to 19 other developing countries. Only 30,9% of SA's adults finished high school or more, compared to 41,3% of the emerging market labour force.
In developed countries 69 ,8% of adults completed high school.
In the MasterCard survey of emerging cities, the overall scores for top South African cities Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town were brought down by the score on education and IT connectivity.
Schussler said Durban outranked Johannesburg in the education category but all three cities were at the bottom of the ranking when it came to performance relative to other countries.
"It's not about money. SA spends a lot more than most emerging markets on education. What is needed is a better system that offers quality."
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