Address by the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor, at the Walter Sisulu University and University of Maryland Eastern Shore international workshop "Global Perspectives in Education", Cape Town

Professor Balintulo, Walter Sisulu VC
Doctor Thelma Thompson, President, University of Maryland Eastern Shore
Workshop participants

It is an honour and a privilege to welcome you to this workshop and to welcome you to South Africa.

Professor Balintulo is a native of the Eastern Cape and I am sure he will tell you a little about his province during the course of the workshop. Like most countries, South Africa has regions of fast economic growth and high employment opportunities and other regions where growth declines or stagnates for a range of reasons. In our case the economic power lies to the north of us in Gauteng, which the foreigners among you should visit. If you get the chance, go and see Maropeng, the cradle of humankind, and even have your Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tested so that you can have proof of where you come from.

The Eastern Cape is not one of our regional economic power houses, although it used to be in pre-colonial times and even into the early years of apartheid. Yet it occupies a special place in our country's history. It is home to a number of famous schools and universities. One university, in particular, is not yet famous but we certainly hope that it will become famous in time. It is today something of an experiment, Walter Sisulu, in that it is a comprehensive institution.

Perhaps Americans are familiar with this institutional form? It is a new type of institution here in South Africa. Its aim is to bridge the gap between the old traditional research universities and the vocational universities that we call universities of technology, so that it can offer different types of programmes in combination with one another.

Our future success depends on the quality of graduates that our comprehensive universities and university of technologies produce in this current period of immense economic expansion in South Africa.

It is Professor Balintulo's task to shape Walter Sisulu into an educational powerhouse in the Eastern Cape. I am sure he will tell you that his problems lie in a shortage of money and a shortage of good students, the best Eastern Cape matriculants choose to study outside the province. Both of these problems are not insurmountable. In government we are giving close attention to improving university finances and to encouraging pupils and students not to seek their futures and fortunes further south and further north.

We live in a time in which the tertiary education sector is expanding exponentially and students have choices little dreamed of in our days as students. That expansion has meant that education has become big business.

Only last month a British Council report in the United Kingdom revealed that education is worth more to the United Kingdom than banking. It is even more remarkable when you remember that education is still provided largely by governments.

Clearly this makes education vital to the United Kingdom economy, and in particular, it makes international students and the tuition fees they pay vital to the United Kingdom economy.

Martin Davidson, Chief Executive of the British Council, said:
"Fundamentally, this report shows the shift of axis of our education system from one that operates predominantly domestically to one that operates on a truly international basis. However, our position is vulnerable. Unless we start taking education much more seriously as a global business, we will lose out to other countries who understand the value of education to their economy much better than we do."

Now that is a warning to us all.

United Kingdom earnings have increased from international students, but the United Kingdom's share of the global international student market has declined.

The United States of America still dominates the market in international students, despite the rise of universities in South and East Asia, where China and India are producing four million graduates a year.

So there is intense competition for international students, and perhaps this workshop is a small sign on the importance of this type of student in our domestic education systems.

We have only about 50 000 international students studying in our universities, out of 760 000 students, not including those many student birds of passage who stop by for a month or three to complete a component of degrees taken in their countries. These numbers are a substantial increase on the mere 5 000 we had in 1994.

We have not quantified the contribution of the 50 000, but the contribution they make to South Africa comes in much more important ways than the purely financial.

It is about this that I want to say a few words in my welcoming remarks to you.

All of our public universities have partnerships with sister institutions across the globe. These relationships include staff and student exchanges, support for capacity building, and research linkages. They are partnerships between peers, shaped for mutual benefit and not for commercial purposes.

Our international partnerships in higher education have also played an important role in helping to reduce the accumulated effects of years of isolation from the global community during apartheid.

I cannot emphasise enough the difference international staff and students make to our higher education system.

Our institutions are enriched by increased diversity. Students do not just learn from books and professors. They learn from all the different people they meet.

Also, diversity plays a key role in transforming our higher education system.

As you may be aware, we have transformed the institutional landscape of higher education and rearranged the spatial geography of apartheid that reserved the best places and resources for whites and left the worst and often rural outposts for black colleges.

Black students and black female students are now in a majority at our institutions and I am pleased to say that most graduates are now black and female as well.

But the process of transformation is not static. It does not wait for change to happen.

We find that the most difficult thing to change is institutional culture, that way of doing things, those invisible patterns of power and influence that determine the way a thing should be done. And that is where we can learn from students and academics, which bring fresh perspectives.

This positive diversity helps democratic South Africa by ensuring that our commitment to Africa and to African solutions is reflected in the culture, organisational ethos, and curriculum framework and content of our higher education institutions.

One of the consequences of hosting international students is that they often remain in the countries where they study. It appears that students from developing countries tend to stay in their alma mater countries, while students from advanced countries tend to go home.

The United States is the magnet for students and skilled workers in the world today. Sending countries have not been successful in luring academic emigrants home.

The International Organisation for Migration estimates that some 300 000 professionals, and millions of others, from the African continent live and work in Europe and North America. And of course our loss is worst in the science and technology fields.

There are policies that countries can adopt to combat this, and we look to the success of Korea and Ireland in fostering return migration as key examples.

These successes have largely been attributed to the growth of domestic investment in science and technology innovation. We are working on encouraging new linkages and activities in the African Diaspora at the moment and we look forward to significant developments in the immediate future.

Regional meetings of the African Diaspora have been held recently. The regional meetings have deliberated on the developmental challenges confronting the continent and have promoted collaborative partnerships in finding solutions to these and in integrating the intellectual resources on the Diaspora in this process.

These meetings have paved the way for a Summit in 2008 of all regions of the Diaspora and all African Heads of State.

In closing, I trust that in the coming days you will give close attention to the key educational policy issues of international education: quality, access and equity, cost, and the contribution of education to growth.

An important matter for you to consider in this workshop is the issue of the cost of providing the international experience that we would like Africans to gain. At present this is very difficult for many African countries and thus international programmes tend to be reliant on donor support.

We need to investigate the support that can be given by African governments for Africans to gain the international experience that will build African education systems and African institutions of higher learning.

We still have a great deal to do in developing and consolidating shared research partnerships between African institutions and the African Diaspora.

The workshop must consider African perspectives and emerging challenges in several important areas.

These include:

* the challenges that Africa faces in providing education access beyond primary education, since many African systems have made significant progress in achieving access to primary schooling
* the development of capacity to ensure that education systems are able to be effective planned and financed
* And particularly, strengthening the capacity and expertise in the public service administration of education and social services.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Education
1 October 2007