Date: 17/08/2005
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Pandor: Gordon Institute of Business Science MBA Forum
Address by the Minister of Education, Ms Naledi Pandor, MP, to the GIBS MBA Forum, Pretoria
EDUCATION PRIORITIES AND COUNTRY COMPETITIVENESS – THE ROLE OF BUSINESS GOVERNMENT AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Professor Marcus,
Professor Binedell,
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen
It is an honour to be invited to address you.
The Helen Suzman MBA bursary award initiative by Gordon Institute Business Science (GIBS) is an important initiative. By providing a platform for affirming and empowering women to fill leadership positions, it supports South Africa in the vital task of achieving equality.
The subject of competitiveness is a critical area of scrutiny for South Africa. All gathered here know that even though we entered the world stage as a free nation rather late, there are no special status rights for new democracies, no concessions in world affairs. This has probably begun to sink into the consciousness of manufacturers in our country; that it’s not the Rand, it’s about competitiveness.
It is useful to begin my exploration of the topic “education priorities and country competitiveness, with reference to the role of business, government and civil society” by reflecting on what others say about us.
Country Competitiveness
Each year many economists and politicians await in anticipation the release of reports and studies on country competitiveness.
Two reports have come to be known as the leading monitors of the competitiveness of economies worldwide – the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum and the World Competitiveness Yearbook of the International Institute for Management Development.
Both reports are said to enhance understanding of the key factors that determine economic growth.
They help explain why some countries are much more successful than others at improving income levels and accelerating development for their citizens.
In the 2004/05 Global Competitiveness report, South Africa was ranked 41st out of 101 countries; in 2001 we were ranked 32nd out of 58 countries.
In both years, South Africa was ranked above China and India but not Brazil.
In the 2004 World Competitiveness Report, South Africa was ranked 49th out of 60 countries; in 2001 we were ranked 42nd out of 49 countries.
The reports point to improving levels of competitiveness and we seem to be doing well in the group of middle-income developing countries.
Positive factors that contributed to our ranking include: sound government finances, a highly competitive exchange rate, judicial independence and the constitutional protection of property rights.
Negative factors, however, include a relatively low tertiary-education enrolment, the limited number of telephone lines and connections to the Internet, a low savings rate and difficulties placed in the path of obtaining credit for the majority of the population.
Our hope is that the Credit Bill, currently before parliament, will do much to turn the latter negative factor around when it becomes law.
The results of the country competitiveness reports do need to be treated with some caution. For example, in the 2000/2001 African competitiveness report we ranked seventh out of 24 African countries. The factors that counted in our favour were a good electricity grid, a fine telephone network, Internet connectivity and cellular infrastructure and a high secondary school enrolment ratio compared with other African countries. (We have a higher primary school enrolment ratio and more girls than boys in school overall.)
These are snapshots, shorthand, indexes; but they do provide a benchmark from which to judge our institutions and policies in relation to the rest of the world.
Education priorities
Since 1994 South Africa has done an enormous amount in providing equitable access to education for all. The legacy of race-based education is being inexorably erased. More children have access to schooling opportunity, many thousands of first generation students study for their first degree with the support of state funding and increasingly professions that were closed to millions of South Africans now seem a probability.
A recent paper by Dr Luis Crouch, formerly of the World Bank, begins with the statement that “the most profound reforms anywhere in the world have been instituted in post-apartheid South Africa”.
Acknowledging this progress does not mean that we have fully achieved our aspirations. Evidence clearly shows that while we have some pockets of excellence in a wide range of education institutions, the hard task of expanding the quality of education is still pressing challenge to South Africa.
Also we need to assess consistently whether our current priorities and actions improve our country’s performance in terms of developing a globally competitive and productive workforce.
In the education sector we have identified a number of areas for action that we believe will give South Africa a competitive boost.
Our first, and most important, priority is to build a strong basic education foundation, on the principle of equitable access, and ensure that the quality of education at all levels improves over time.
A second priority is to expand Grade R in public primary schools so that by 2010 all learners in Grade 1 have participated in an accredited Grade R programme. This will result in compulsory schooling from Grade R up to Grade 9.
A third priority is the attention being paid to the successful implementation of the new curriculum that is designed to improve the performance of learners in maths and science as well as other scarce subject areas from grades 10 to 12. Investing in and building up a solid scientific foundation for our learners will increasingly give our nation a competitive edge in years to come. A fourth priority is the elimination of classroom shortages and basic infrastructure provision in areas where the need is the greatest, such as Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape. Investment in such infrastructure should improve the quality of learning as well as address the deprived conditions in some of our existing schools.
A fifth priority is to develop and support the Further Education and Training (FET) college sector in order to deal with the current demands of our economy for middle-level skills. Funding of over R1.5 billion over the next three years has been set aside for the re-capitalisation of these colleges.
The current challenge is to ensure that FET colleges provide quality learning programmes and learning opportunities that respond to the challenges of the regions in which they are located. For the FET sector to be effective and responsive to these challenges, it must establish and maintain strategic partnerships with government, business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
A sixth priority is the improvement of our capacity in research and development.
Business and higher education institutions have a big role to play in enhancing the country’s involvement in research and development.
According to a survey commissioned by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), South Africa spent about 0.81% proportion of GDP (R10.1 billion) on research and development (R&D) in 2003/04, an improvement from the 0.76% proportion of GDP spent in 2001/02 - but not enough to make us global players as yet.
Private investment in research partnerships with government and universities – the triple helix relationship (government, business and higher education) - can do much to propel the economy towards developing new technologies and developing the ability to assimilate those that come from elsewhere in the world.
Added to these is the need to ensure adequate support to higher education, a more nuanced understanding of our economic growth path in the education sector, and the deliberate support for new ideas, inventions and entrepreneurs.
The business sector and NGOs have a vital role to play in supporting these priorities; in fact, many achievements in education to date have only been possible because of their support.
Linked to these priorities is the need to ensure that, as we improve the skills and qualifications of our work force, we contribute to competitiveness and also to equipping society for its developmental mandate. Some people regard these as conflicting objectives. However, it is important to recognise that South Africa’s sustainable success depends on changing the life chances of the poor and most marginalized.
We need to constantly push a ‘progressive agenda’ that supports a developmental state. This requires an active civil society and an engaged business sector.
It is this cooperation and working together that should continue to guide the policies that are developed to improve our economy.
Women and the MBA bursary award initiative The area of business transformation is one in which women, the potential recipients of the Helen Suzman MBA bursary, could play a leading role.
This is because, despite progress in creating access for a new generation of black and women MBA graduates, the student profile of MBA programmes in still largely white and male.
To quote Professor Binedell in a Finance Week article, 2 August 2005: “South Africa has a huge need for management development - and there are not enough people in senior positions with the right business knowledge”.
There are certainly not enough women in senior positions.
The statistics are alarming; they show that currently, the boardroom may be focussing on and attending to the needs of only one gender in society.
We need more representivity, more empowerment of women and more inclusion of marginalized groups in the economy.
We also need more women MBA graduates; they will be able to articulate the needs of women in the organisations within which they work, be it in government or in the private sector.
A focus on what was referred to as “the right business knowledge” is also important to building the competitive edge.
The quality of our MBA programmes, following the MBA review conducted by the Council for Higher Education, has ensured that we can now be confident that the skills and qualifications our MBAs acquire will serve them well in their leadership positions.
‘The right business knowledge’, acquired through the MBA programmes, will serve to ensure that we educate people who will not only be more competitive in the job market but who will possess the correct mix of skills, and the correct attitude and passion to management.
Part of that attitude is a good grounding in what used to be called business ethics and what is now called corporate social responsibility.
Last year the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business published its report Ethics Education in Business Schools. The report was certainly an incentive to business schools. Embedding corporate social responsibility in MBA programmes is not difficult. But it does mean conducting locally relevant research.
Last year’s Council of Higher Education (CHE) report into MBA provision asks: “How many case studies have been produced at South African business schools that analyse market deregulation and public enterprise privatisation from the point of view of the triple bottom line of sustainable business? How many case studies are focusing on the ways in which black economic empowerment is advancing social objectives? Research on accounting, marketing, strategy, governance, operations management, organisational behaviour and economics, to mention only a few subjects taught in the MBA, is needed to identify the topics relevant for the development of new management practices in South Africa.”
What do our MBAs learn about how to prevent a South African Enron?
In closing, I want to say a word about graduate unemployment.
We have begun to see the phenomenon of graduate unemployment. It has expanded since 1995 (from 6% to 15%) and most of those unemployed are African graduates.
How can we have graduate unemployment when the goal of higher education is to transform society and to make South Africa an internationally competitive nation with developmental responsibilities on the continent?
This poses a very difficult set of problems for education and for South Africa.
There is a mismatch between the education our graduates are receiving and the jobs that are available to them in the economy. At the same time there is also a mismatch between the training that is available to those school leavers who do not move on into higher education and the demand for skills in the economy.
It is easier to design policy to align the mismatch in further education than the mismatch in higher education.
Employability is one of the three main indexes of higher education responsiveness to economic development (innovation and business-higher education partnerships are the other two).
But it is no simple matter to predict labour supply and demand. Signals from the world of work to higher education are never simple and in fact, increasingly, appear more complex and ambiguous.
Then there are changing definitions of employability.
What are the attributes of an employable graduate - traditional (critical evaluation of evidence, application of theory) versus new core skills (communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, organisational knowledge)? Further, judging from the way the gender ratios at our higher education institutes have switched in the last ten years, it seems boys believe they can find work without a post school qualification; what are the reasons for this belief?
Several university leaders have warned about a utilitarian approach to education and training. They assert that there is no direct correlation between responsiveness and employability.
We support the view that our higher education institutions have an obligation to the broader objective of the public good rather than the narrow obligation to servicing the labour market. However, we cannot accept a view that says universities can blithely ignore society and its needs. That broader objective critically involves educating our students to become part of a socially committed and critical citizenry.
Our universities are an important resource for South Africa in the search for competitiveness and responsiveness. We are engaged with them in the identification of activities and policies that will support innovation while also the continued existence of academic culture and practices that support transformation. These are the challenges that face a transforming system of education.
Let me end there, and say I have little doubt that the bursary initiative is a step in the right direction, a step that does much to support the task of changing institutional practices that work against the advancement of women, either consciously or unconsciously.
Issued by: Ministry of Education
17 August 2005
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Pandor: Gordon Institute of Business Science MBA Forum
Address by the Minister of Education, Ms Naledi Pandor, MP, to the GIBS MBA Forum, Pretoria
EDUCATION PRIORITIES AND COUNTRY COMPETITIVENESS – THE ROLE OF BUSINESS GOVERNMENT AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Professor Marcus,
Professor Binedell,
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen
It is an honour to be invited to address you.
The Helen Suzman MBA bursary award initiative by Gordon Institute Business Science (GIBS) is an important initiative. By providing a platform for affirming and empowering women to fill leadership positions, it supports South Africa in the vital task of achieving equality.
The subject of competitiveness is a critical area of scrutiny for South Africa. All gathered here know that even though we entered the world stage as a free nation rather late, there are no special status rights for new democracies, no concessions in world affairs. This has probably begun to sink into the consciousness of manufacturers in our country; that it’s not the Rand, it’s about competitiveness.
It is useful to begin my exploration of the topic “education priorities and country competitiveness, with reference to the role of business, government and civil society” by reflecting on what others say about us.
Country Competitiveness
Each year many economists and politicians await in anticipation the release of reports and studies on country competitiveness.
Two reports have come to be known as the leading monitors of the competitiveness of economies worldwide – the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum and the World Competitiveness Yearbook of the International Institute for Management Development.
Both reports are said to enhance understanding of the key factors that determine economic growth.
They help explain why some countries are much more successful than others at improving income levels and accelerating development for their citizens.
In the 2004/05 Global Competitiveness report, South Africa was ranked 41st out of 101 countries; in 2001 we were ranked 32nd out of 58 countries.
In both years, South Africa was ranked above China and India but not Brazil.
In the 2004 World Competitiveness Report, South Africa was ranked 49th out of 60 countries; in 2001 we were ranked 42nd out of 49 countries.
The reports point to improving levels of competitiveness and we seem to be doing well in the group of middle-income developing countries.
Positive factors that contributed to our ranking include: sound government finances, a highly competitive exchange rate, judicial independence and the constitutional protection of property rights.
Negative factors, however, include a relatively low tertiary-education enrolment, the limited number of telephone lines and connections to the Internet, a low savings rate and difficulties placed in the path of obtaining credit for the majority of the population.
Our hope is that the Credit Bill, currently before parliament, will do much to turn the latter negative factor around when it becomes law.
The results of the country competitiveness reports do need to be treated with some caution. For example, in the 2000/2001 African competitiveness report we ranked seventh out of 24 African countries. The factors that counted in our favour were a good electricity grid, a fine telephone network, Internet connectivity and cellular infrastructure and a high secondary school enrolment ratio compared with other African countries. (We have a higher primary school enrolment ratio and more girls than boys in school overall.)
These are snapshots, shorthand, indexes; but they do provide a benchmark from which to judge our institutions and policies in relation to the rest of the world.
Education priorities
Since 1994 South Africa has done an enormous amount in providing equitable access to education for all. The legacy of race-based education is being inexorably erased. More children have access to schooling opportunity, many thousands of first generation students study for their first degree with the support of state funding and increasingly professions that were closed to millions of South Africans now seem a probability.
A recent paper by Dr Luis Crouch, formerly of the World Bank, begins with the statement that “the most profound reforms anywhere in the world have been instituted in post-apartheid South Africa”.
Acknowledging this progress does not mean that we have fully achieved our aspirations. Evidence clearly shows that while we have some pockets of excellence in a wide range of education institutions, the hard task of expanding the quality of education is still pressing challenge to South Africa.
Also we need to assess consistently whether our current priorities and actions improve our country’s performance in terms of developing a globally competitive and productive workforce.
In the education sector we have identified a number of areas for action that we believe will give South Africa a competitive boost.
Our first, and most important, priority is to build a strong basic education foundation, on the principle of equitable access, and ensure that the quality of education at all levels improves over time.
A second priority is to expand Grade R in public primary schools so that by 2010 all learners in Grade 1 have participated in an accredited Grade R programme. This will result in compulsory schooling from Grade R up to Grade 9.
A third priority is the attention being paid to the successful implementation of the new curriculum that is designed to improve the performance of learners in maths and science as well as other scarce subject areas from grades 10 to 12. Investing in and building up a solid scientific foundation for our learners will increasingly give our nation a competitive edge in years to come. A fourth priority is the elimination of classroom shortages and basic infrastructure provision in areas where the need is the greatest, such as Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape. Investment in such infrastructure should improve the quality of learning as well as address the deprived conditions in some of our existing schools.
A fifth priority is to develop and support the Further Education and Training (FET) college sector in order to deal with the current demands of our economy for middle-level skills. Funding of over R1.5 billion over the next three years has been set aside for the re-capitalisation of these colleges.
The current challenge is to ensure that FET colleges provide quality learning programmes and learning opportunities that respond to the challenges of the regions in which they are located. For the FET sector to be effective and responsive to these challenges, it must establish and maintain strategic partnerships with government, business and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
A sixth priority is the improvement of our capacity in research and development.
Business and higher education institutions have a big role to play in enhancing the country’s involvement in research and development.
According to a survey commissioned by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), South Africa spent about 0.81% proportion of GDP (R10.1 billion) on research and development (R&D) in 2003/04, an improvement from the 0.76% proportion of GDP spent in 2001/02 - but not enough to make us global players as yet.
Private investment in research partnerships with government and universities – the triple helix relationship (government, business and higher education) - can do much to propel the economy towards developing new technologies and developing the ability to assimilate those that come from elsewhere in the world.
Added to these is the need to ensure adequate support to higher education, a more nuanced understanding of our economic growth path in the education sector, and the deliberate support for new ideas, inventions and entrepreneurs.
The business sector and NGOs have a vital role to play in supporting these priorities; in fact, many achievements in education to date have only been possible because of their support.
Linked to these priorities is the need to ensure that, as we improve the skills and qualifications of our work force, we contribute to competitiveness and also to equipping society for its developmental mandate. Some people regard these as conflicting objectives. However, it is important to recognise that South Africa’s sustainable success depends on changing the life chances of the poor and most marginalized.
We need to constantly push a ‘progressive agenda’ that supports a developmental state. This requires an active civil society and an engaged business sector.
It is this cooperation and working together that should continue to guide the policies that are developed to improve our economy.
Women and the MBA bursary award initiative The area of business transformation is one in which women, the potential recipients of the Helen Suzman MBA bursary, could play a leading role.
This is because, despite progress in creating access for a new generation of black and women MBA graduates, the student profile of MBA programmes in still largely white and male.
To quote Professor Binedell in a Finance Week article, 2 August 2005: “South Africa has a huge need for management development - and there are not enough people in senior positions with the right business knowledge”.
There are certainly not enough women in senior positions.
The statistics are alarming; they show that currently, the boardroom may be focussing on and attending to the needs of only one gender in society.
We need more representivity, more empowerment of women and more inclusion of marginalized groups in the economy.
We also need more women MBA graduates; they will be able to articulate the needs of women in the organisations within which they work, be it in government or in the private sector.
A focus on what was referred to as “the right business knowledge” is also important to building the competitive edge.
The quality of our MBA programmes, following the MBA review conducted by the Council for Higher Education, has ensured that we can now be confident that the skills and qualifications our MBAs acquire will serve them well in their leadership positions.
‘The right business knowledge’, acquired through the MBA programmes, will serve to ensure that we educate people who will not only be more competitive in the job market but who will possess the correct mix of skills, and the correct attitude and passion to management.
Part of that attitude is a good grounding in what used to be called business ethics and what is now called corporate social responsibility.
Last year the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business published its report Ethics Education in Business Schools. The report was certainly an incentive to business schools. Embedding corporate social responsibility in MBA programmes is not difficult. But it does mean conducting locally relevant research.
Last year’s Council of Higher Education (CHE) report into MBA provision asks: “How many case studies have been produced at South African business schools that analyse market deregulation and public enterprise privatisation from the point of view of the triple bottom line of sustainable business? How many case studies are focusing on the ways in which black economic empowerment is advancing social objectives? Research on accounting, marketing, strategy, governance, operations management, organisational behaviour and economics, to mention only a few subjects taught in the MBA, is needed to identify the topics relevant for the development of new management practices in South Africa.”
What do our MBAs learn about how to prevent a South African Enron?
In closing, I want to say a word about graduate unemployment.
We have begun to see the phenomenon of graduate unemployment. It has expanded since 1995 (from 6% to 15%) and most of those unemployed are African graduates.
How can we have graduate unemployment when the goal of higher education is to transform society and to make South Africa an internationally competitive nation with developmental responsibilities on the continent?
This poses a very difficult set of problems for education and for South Africa.
There is a mismatch between the education our graduates are receiving and the jobs that are available to them in the economy. At the same time there is also a mismatch between the training that is available to those school leavers who do not move on into higher education and the demand for skills in the economy.
It is easier to design policy to align the mismatch in further education than the mismatch in higher education.
Employability is one of the three main indexes of higher education responsiveness to economic development (innovation and business-higher education partnerships are the other two).
But it is no simple matter to predict labour supply and demand. Signals from the world of work to higher education are never simple and in fact, increasingly, appear more complex and ambiguous.
Then there are changing definitions of employability.
What are the attributes of an employable graduate - traditional (critical evaluation of evidence, application of theory) versus new core skills (communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, organisational knowledge)? Further, judging from the way the gender ratios at our higher education institutes have switched in the last ten years, it seems boys believe they can find work without a post school qualification; what are the reasons for this belief?
Several university leaders have warned about a utilitarian approach to education and training. They assert that there is no direct correlation between responsiveness and employability.
We support the view that our higher education institutions have an obligation to the broader objective of the public good rather than the narrow obligation to servicing the labour market. However, we cannot accept a view that says universities can blithely ignore society and its needs. That broader objective critically involves educating our students to become part of a socially committed and critical citizenry.
Our universities are an important resource for South Africa in the search for competitiveness and responsiveness. We are engaged with them in the identification of activities and policies that will support innovation while also the continued existence of academic culture and practices that support transformation. These are the challenges that face a transforming system of education.
Let me end there, and say I have little doubt that the bursary initiative is a step in the right direction, a step that does much to support the task of changing institutional practices that work against the advancement of women, either consciously or unconsciously.
Issued by: Ministry of Education
17 August 2005
Advertisement
EMAIL THIS ARTICLE SAVE THIS ARTICLE FEEDBACK
To subscribe email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za or click here
To advertise email advertising@creamermedia.co.za or click here
