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Joining CNBC Africa is Modupe Mujota, Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology to discuss ways to drive investments into the Ogun State&#8217;s education sector.

Investing in Ogun state’s education sector

Sioux McKenna | Rhodes University
Universities in many parts of the world are buckling under multiple financial, societal and political demands. This has led to increasingly loud calls for what are called “enhanced efficiencies” – a term drawn from the business world.
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And some institutions are heeding those calls. They’re drawing wholesale on the logic of the market in their bid to survive. They are becoming administrative universities without truly understanding how such initiatives chip away at the very purpose of higher education: the academic project.
The nature of the academic project differs from institution to institution – some will focus more on workplace employment, others on critical citizenship, and so on. But it will always be about the furthering of knowledge and the development of knowers.
In 2011, Benjamin Ginsberg, political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, argued that US universities were losing hold of the academic project by becoming administrative institutions.
He also showed that as student numbers increased across the US, the number of academics being employed to teach them and guide their research rose at the same or a slightly slower pace. But there was an astounding simultaneous increase in executive positions, usually people with business rather than academic acumen.
Despite these warnings, other countries have followed the US’s lead. South Africa is among them. This is cause for concern for both those inside universities and those in broader society who benefit from having a strong academic sector that fosters sustainable development, builds democracy and contributes to various other public goods.
It is crucial to ensure that the academic project at South African universities is vigorously and bravely safeguarded.
<h2>Five signs</h2>
South Africa’s universities are turning into administrative institutions for several reasons. They’re dealing with crippling financial constraints; their costs are rising, but state funding is not matching these increases. There’s also a need to decolonise the structure and content of the curriculum.
Massification – the rapid growth of student numbers – is another issue. More than 20% of South Africans aged between 18 and 23 are now at university. The system has to attend to a diverse student body with highly uneven schooling and other prior experiences.
Leaders at many institutions seem to think the solution lies in learning from the world of business and putting more administrative structures in place.
There are five tell-tale signs of the administrative university:
1. New executive positions (and salaries): These positions, almost always prefaced by the words “executive director”, are becoming increasingly common. Their roles are related to everything from human resources to strategic planning to quality assurance. Each comes with a number of support staff – and a lot of meetings.
Individually such posts seem reasonable. Collectively, they shift the institution from university to corporation.
2. Appointments, not elections: In administrative universities deans are appointed by a selection committee, usually with a strong focus on their management skills. They must implement management decisions down into faculties and are often hired on contract with clearly stated performance targets.
Gone is the elected dean, chosen by a specific faculty to offer academic leadership, defend the academic project, and represent the needs and concerns of staff and students to management.
3. Decisions and policies: The moment the “executive management” team is made up of more administrator positions than academic ones, it is unlikely that decisions will primarily serve the academic project. Administrative efficiency, legal compliance and financial sustainability are all vitally important. But decisions and policies around these issues must first and foremost follow the logic of the academic project
4. Regulatory frameworks: Administrative universities love a politically correct catchphrase. In South Africa, the current favourites are transparency and social justice. These terms are then used to justify the implementation of many one-size-fits-all regulatory frameworks which govern every process from admission through to graduation.
Of course decisions need to be transparent, recorded and justified but we also need to make sure that decisions are based on what is fairest in a particular context. It cannot be considered social justice when processes become swathed in bureaucracy with no flexibility to take individual contexts into account in a very uneven society.
5. Quick fixes: Because these administrators set themselves up as being responsible for instilling efficiency into every aspect of the system, there is significant role confusion.
Soon, as Ginsberg showed in the US, administrators are commenting on issues which are entirely entwined with the academic project. Proposed common sense “interventions”, like add-on remedial classes, are advocated as being supportive. But they actually fly in the face of well documented teaching and learning research.
<h2>Bureaucratic bloat</h2>
This article is not an attack on the dedicated individual administrators who help universities run smoothly. They are as crucial to keeping institutions going as academic staff. And they, just like academic staff, become badly overburdened in an overly administrative university. The issue is that introducing significant, expensive administrative structures too often comes at the cost of the pursuit and development of knowledge.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93100/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />The blame for this bloat of bureaucracy doesn’t only rest with executive administrators. Academics have ceded the academic project to the empty rhetoric of efficiency. For academics to collectively resist these processes, they need to put up their hands to take on leadership roles and to participate in processes aimed at keeping the academic project as their university’s central driving logic.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Five signs that universities are turning into corporations….

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CNBC Africa caught up with Special Adviser on education to the Lagos State Governor, Obafela Bank-Olemoh to discuss the opportunities in Lagos State’s education sector.

Opportunities in Lagos State’s education sector

Sharon Fonn, University of the Witwatersrand
In this complex world a number of factors affect both the distribution and prevalence of disease and the effectiveness of interventions to prevent or reduce disease. These factors are social, physical, environmental and historical. It follows, then, that challenges in public health require a multidisciplinary approach.
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This means that if researchers want to make an impact on public health they can’t just have a thorough grounding in their own discipline. They also need to be literate in other research approaches and methods. Knowledge generated from various theories of learning suggest alternative insights and interventions that may be effective in making this a reality.
Various programmes have been developed to help scholars engage in multidisciplinary research. One of them is the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA). The aim of the programme is to build a critical mass of effective researchers to improve health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. And, since there’s a scarcity of African-led public health research, it’s also working to develop researchers with cross-disciplinary competencies. Once their training is done, these scientists should be capable of heading multidisciplinary research teams.
The programme is focused on scholars in sub-Saharan Africa. But the model has international relevance. Globally, there are major health challenges that need to be addressed by innovative research. The approach developed under CARTA could be adapted to other contexts and would prepare PhD candidates to address complex health problems in different countries and geographies.
<h2>Teaching differently</h2>
The consortium brings together nine African universities, four African research centres and a number of partners from the global North. Since 2011, a cohort of new PhD students have joined the programme each year making a total of 165. They have all received structured, supplementary training over a three-year period. This supplements the PhD training they’re receiving at their home universities, which is almost always discipline-specific. The programmes’ focus, on the other hand, is multidisciplinary.
One of the key parts of their training is a series of joint advanced seminars. There are four of these for each cohort, and they’re residential; the fellows gather in different countries and locations for four weeks at a time. The seminars promote knowledge sharing and they also provide a supportive network of researchers within and between cohorts.
One of the most important elements of the seminars is how they’re taught. Many sub-Saharan universities are poorly funded and classes are huge, especially at undergraduate level. This means that didactic teaching is often the norm: the lecturer is the “sage on a stage” who talks without letting students engage.
By contrast, the seminars use participatory and experiential learning. Teaching sessions are informal, inviting critique and robust discussion. They challenge hierarchy – for example junior lecturers are encouraged to debate professors. Value is measured by the coherence of an argument or the robustness of evidence, not on the status of the person making the point. This encourages fellows to use evidence and theory to defend their argument; it reinforces that there is no hierarchy between disciplines.
CARTA’s approach to teaching also shows how a multidisciplinary approach can work in practice. For example, sessions can be co-facilitated by an epidemiologist and an anthropologist.
<h2>A valuable experience</h2>
So, is all of this working? To provide some answers, data has been drawn on from across the cohorts. The fellows were asked questions about their experiences and learning.
The evidence suggests that the seminars, and the broader programme, is bearing fruit. PhD students who have attended the programme show that they are able to think and work across disciplines.
Some have made changes to their research question, choice of literature, study design and analysis plan. One, from the second cohort, wrote:
&#8220;I never thought of how law could influence healthcare provision for the aged, especially in terms of access to postreproductive care services. … I am trying to expand my research … in this direction.&#8221;
Another wrote that after the second seminar “I joined the social science network at my home institution and I actively participate with the hope to learn and acquire more skills in qualitative research”.
Three fellows also reported that they were using mixed methods in research outside of their PhD studies:
&#8220;Training on mixed methods has influenced me. I applied for a local institution competitive grant using mixed methods approach to explore noise pollution in a teaching hospital. I won the grant and I have already completed the qualitative aspect of the study – my first attempt at qualitative research.&#8221;
Fellows also reported that they’d found ways to communicate better to a wider range of disciplinary colleagues.
<h2>Some unanswered questions</h2>
There are gaps in the data. A way to assess whether each PhD fellow gained sufficient breadth and depth has not yet been found. There is confidence that the PhD fellows can engage meaningfully across disciplines, but it has not assessed whether multidisciplinary training makes for a better statistician or social scientist.
It is also unknown if the ability to work across disciplines or maintain anti-hierarchical values will be sustained. The world of science, government, funding agencies, universities and research institutions is largely still structured around scholarly disciplines. Most institutions remain conservative when it comes to hierarchy, so fellows may find it hard to sustain anti-hierarchial approaches.
And longer-term follow up to assess the impact of the programme on the production of research evidence and its impact will need to be done.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92188/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />Still, the process evaluation suggests the path is the right one. And there is no reason that other organisations or institutions can’t adopt and adapt the model for their own contexts.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Op-Ed: Want to solve complex health issues? Train scholars to think across disciplines

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In his book, As by Fire &#8211; Professor Jonathan Jansen takes us through the unprecedented disruption of universities that caught South Africa by surprise and the language of fire as a means and form of protest in South Africa.

How Ramaphosa can fix the education crises, says Jansen

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This content was supplied to CNBC Africa by Standard Bank 
We live in exciting times where our daily lives are dominated by innovation. The education landscape is also gradually changing as new inventions and new ways of teaching become the norm. It’s worth noting that innovation does not only mean technology, but it encompasses any creative, new way of doing things. If it improves learning, processes and systems, or solves a real problem, then it is innovation.
We want to highlight some of the ways in which creativity has been applied to solve some of these plaguing educational issues, across the African continent. They include:
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<li>High and unaffordable fees.</li>
<li>Lack of access to learning material for pupils.</li>
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MATHS MEETS HIP-HOP
One of the biggest flaws in the education system is the assumption that all children learn in the same way. A single, age-old learning method of sitting behind a desk and absorbing facts and numbers is still used across the world. While this technique works for some learners, it does a disservice to others, who are left feeling academically inadequate.
A maths teacher in Cape Town is turning the traditional teaching method on its head.  He is using rap music to help learners remember their multiplication tables. Kurt Minnaar, a former hip-hop dancer and choreographer, has creatively come up with a system of turning maths concepts and numbers into hip-hop lyrics – a language that his grade 8 learners understand very well.
“There are four types of learning methodologies &#8211; kinaesthetic, visual, audible and the traditional reading and writing. Kinaesthetic learning is when pupils learn through movement; visual through sight; audible through what they hear and the traditional reading and writing method is when pupils are more independent and able to learn in the traditional sense,” the Cape Town teacher <a href="http://www.parent24.com/Learn/High-school/teachers-who-have-the-most-creative-way-of-teaching-20161122">explains</a>. “When you fuse creativity into lessons, you cater to more pupils, and more will understand because now you&#8217;re speaking their language. Whereas if I just &#8216;chalk and talk&#8217; and stand there in front of a class, it predominantly only caters to one type of pupil, who are also in the minority.”
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Minnaar used to struggle with maths in school. At the time, he thought he was incapable of grasping the complexities of the subject but later realised he needed a different way of learning. He says his students are incessantly in a cheerful mood as they come to class eager to break it down to his rhymes. The pupils’ marks have also improved, says Minnaar.
MOBILE SCHOOLS 
In some parts of Africa, the tradition of nomadic pastoralism is still alive. People move from one location to another in search of grazing lands for their livestock. For children who grow up in such families, the on-the-go lifestyle proves to be a barrier to education as they struggle to attend school regularly.
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Fortunately, for some nomadic school children in Kenya, access to education has become easier as they can now move around with their school! In 2010, the Kenyan government joined forces with UNICEF to launch mobile schools which brought education to learners whose families had to relocate frequently in order to survive. As part of the initiative, teachers now live and travel with the nomadic groups, setting up tents and temporary schools.
The mobile schools normally plan their calendar around rainfall patterns. Most of the learning takes place during the rainy seasons when children do not have a lot of household chores.
CROWDFUNDING FEES WITH FEENIX
 The #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa shone a glaring spotlight on the issue of the rising costs of education.  Many students are struggling to pay for their tertiary education. In an effort to help students, who cannot afford high university fees, crowdfunding initiatives have mushroomed. <a href="https://www.feenix.org/how-it-works">Feenix.org</a> is an online platform which allows donors to donate money to students registered on the site.
1068 Live student profiles have been uploaded onto the platform which features their biographies and fees statements.  Once a profile has been verified it, and the fees needed, becomes visible to anyone who visits the site. With the minimum donation set at R100 (US $7.5) anyone is welcome to make a donation.  85 Students have been fully funded since this initiative started.
Up to date R4.3 million has been raised by 744 funders (of which consists both individual and business funding).  Donors are also required to upload their information and go through a verification process.
E-LEARNING IS GROWING
Technology is transforming education in Africa at an unprecedented rate. With the rapid growth of mobile learning, the e-learning market is set to be worth well over US $530 million by 2018. E-learning is not only helping students learn better, but it is also giving underprivileged learners inexpensive access to educational content.
In Kenya, adoption of e-learning is happening at an impressive rate.  Schools in low-income areas are using technology to boost their learning. In Nairobi’s Kawangware area, students are using eLimu, an app for primary school learners to learn and revise for their exams. The platform contains educational content in the form of locally produced and culturally relevant videos, animations, songs, music, games and quizzes to improve learning.
One of the other successful e-learning platforms in Kenya is Kytabu, a textbook subscription platform that provides low-cost digitalised books to millions of students. Kytabu allows users to rent textbooks, chapters, and pages on a low-cost Android app and pay with M-Pesa, the successful East African mobile money transfer service.
LEARNING THROUGH ROBOTICS
Ghanaian company, Metro Institute of Innovation and Technology (MIT), offers school children training in robotics and mobile app development.  Their aim is to promote science and entrepreneurship in this way. The company applies innovative ways to introduce technology to learners and help enhance their learning.
Offering lessons to children of all ages, MIT established the National Robotics Summer School.  Attending this school, learners can take their science skills to the next level by programming robots and designing games. “We’re trying to use robotics as a tool to inspire the study of science and maths, to relate classroom theories using robots so that if we’re talking about a scientific principle, they [the learners] shouldn’t just memorise the facts,” <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/innovate-africa/2014/11/innovate-africa-tech-teaching-2014111712128255343.html">explains</a> Ben Nortey, Founder and CEO of MIT.
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How innovation is turning education on its head in Africa   

Craig Blewett, University of KwaZulu-Natal
It’s a rather impressive, if controversial, resume for a teenager: blamed for the election of Donald Trump, increased divorce rates, rising syphilis cases, and the advent of fake news.
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Facebook turns 14 on February 4. And the controversies continue unabated. But there’s one aspect of Facebook that should not be lost in all the noise: the extraordinary change it has brought about in how we connect, communicate, consume and share content – in the classroom, as well as in other spaces.
Putting the words “Facebook” and “learning” together may seem like an oxymoron. But my research has delved into the role Facebook has played in shaping how the new generation consumes and shares content. Understanding this is pivotal to understanding how we should be using technology to teach in the digital age. Quite simply, Facebook has changed the way that children learn.
<h2>How students learn</h2>
That’s what I’ve discovered through my research, which used a cyber-ethnography approach to try and determine how students are learning in our modern digital age. This involved essentially “living” with students while they connected, communicated, and learned in a Facebook space.
I spent an entire semester watching and interacting with students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa as they used a Facebook page as their primary learning portal. The students were given admin access to the space. This meant they could determine how the space was used: who had access to it, how it was designed, what was posted on the page, and even the level of anonymity of their posts.
This provided me with an opportunity to watch the students learn, unfettered from traditional learning constraints. However, it would take a while for the students to fully explore their learning within this new space. Initially the students would often attempt to defer to me and my guidance. Only after I repeatedly refused to control their learning experience did they begin to behave in a self-oraganising way and allow me to observe their “natural” learning patterns.
The research revealed that Facebook provided students with a series of learning affordances. Affordances are “can do” oppportunies, some intentional and others unintentional, that technology spaces provide. In this instance the research revealed that the affordances at play were accessibility, connection, communication, control and construction. These affordances provide valuable insights into how students learn in digital spaces.
Once I understood this, I could turn my attention to the key need: developing ways of teaching, called pedagogies, that are appropriate for the digital age. Currently the focus on technology – the what, has distracted us from pedagogy: the how. Without understanding how best to apply these new technologies’ affordances, educators will not be able to effectively impact teaching in the modern classroom.
However, providing educators with a list of “how tos” isn’t much use without a system that makes the list easy to implement. As Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says:
&#8220;I can tell people they need to teach better. But if I don’t give them things that are easy for them to implement, they won’t do it.&#8221;
<h2>Activating the classroom</h2>
That’s where the Activated Classroom Teaching (ACT) model comes in. I developed this model in a bid to create a taxonomy of teaching and learning for 21st century classrooms. A taxonomy is an ordered arrangement of items. One of the most famous of these is Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking. The ACT model attempts to provide a taxonomy of digital-age teaching approaches.
The ACT model consists of five digital-age pedagogies that seek to maximise the affordances of technology, modern students’ approaches to learning and the development of key 21st century skills such as creativity, problem solving, curiosity, critical thinking, etc.
The focus is a shift from passive ways of teaching (consumption) to active approaches (curation, conversation, correction, creation and chaos). This aligns with research that shows children are spending more than half their online time actively engaging: creating content, getting involved in “interactive consumption” and communicating.
Ignoring the tectonic shifts taking place in our classrooms is not the solution. Simply dropping technology into our classrooms is not the solution. Simply training teachers to use computers is not the solution. As British author and education expert Sir Ken Robinson has said, we need a paradigm shift, but it’s more than that &#8211; we need a pedagogy shift.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90552/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />The young teen, Facebook, has changed how we connect and learn. But, as the OECD pointed out in its global study about educational technology: “If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”
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This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Op-Ed: Why putting the words ‘learning’ and ‘Facebook’ together isn’t an oxymoron

By: The Growth Institute
There is a perpetual myth that public universities and colleges fleece students by making class fees as expensive as possible. According to this myth, public universities and colleges are the apex of exploitative capitalism.
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It might come as a shock to many to know that class fees represent roughly 30% of a public tertiary institution’s total income. Another 40% of a public university’s income is derived from State funds, based on the throughput rates achieved by public universities and colleges. The remaining 30% comes from the so-called Third Stream, and more specifically from private donations and from teaching specialised courses for corporates.
Announcements that public universities and colleges should not charge for class fees, means that someone else would have to make up the 30% revenue shortfall that would result from “Free Education.”
Looking specifically at the State’s 40% contribution, it may also come as a surprise that the State has decided to reduce undergraduate subsides in favour of post-graduate subsidies. This means that there is less funds available for a first year or for any other undergraduate to start studies or to complete studies.
The State’s strategy to put an emphasis on post-graduate subsidies is not good news for undergraduates. This means that undergraduates have to have counter-strategies in place to ensure that they continue to receive State Funding. That counter-strategy is not to be found in uprisings and burning of campuses. Instead, the counter-strategy must be to achieve better marks that will enable students to claim merit bursaries.
The argument is that not all students can achieve high marks because they come out of difficult circumstances where the school system failed them. The answer to that argument is that private institutions draw students from the same recruiting pool that public universities and colleges use. The answer is also that public tertiary institutions achieve an annual throughput rate of 20%, whereas private institutions achieve an annual throughput rate of more than 50%.
The fact that State subsidies for undergraduates are reduced in favour of post-graduates means that private institutions would have to ensure they have competitive pricing models available that will meet the demand for undergraduate studies in the near future.

Op-Ed: The Thorn of Free Education

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While the right to education is indisputable, many challenges persist that prevent equal access to quality education particularly at tertiary level and the biggest challenge is funding. Joining CNBC Africa for more on this Andrew McCurrie, Discovery.

It cost R2m to educate your child from crèche to university, here’s how you can afford it

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While under pressure from a resurgence of the far-right at home, European leaders, such as French President, Emmanuel Macron and Germany&#8217;s Prime Minister Angela Merkel are set to meet their African counterparts in Cote d&#8217;Ivoire today.

Merkel, Macron’s Africa trip: Expectations and the unexpected

Tahiru Azaaviele Liedong, University of Bath
In 2002, the African Union reported that Africa lost about USD$148 billion through corruption every year. This represented 25% of the continent’s combined GDP at the time. Nothing much has changed.
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Last year, the global business advisory firm KPMG estimated that if South Africa reduced its corruption by one point, as measured by Transparency International’s corruption perception index, it could add R23 billion to its GDP.
The thrust of these facts is that the lost monies could have been used to finance institutional development and reduce the constraints to doing business in Africa.
In spite of the effects of corruption on the private sector, businesses in Africa are relatively silent about the menace. Efforts to combat corruption are largely championed by civil service, non-governmental organisations and international development agencies.
A new study has linked the private sector’s silence to the inadequacy of business education in the region. It notes that business schools can play a vital role in the fight against corruption. They can do this by nurturing business students to become institutional entrepreneurs – people who will bring about institutional change – not only in Africa’s economic domain, but also in the political arena.
Schools can equip students and managers with knowledge and expertise to advocate for public accountability and good governance, as advocated by the World Economic Forum.
<h2>Why the private sector is silent</h2>
There are several reasons why private companies often remain silent about corruption. One is that some of them indulge in and benefit from corruption.
In Ghana, for example, a “create-loot-share” model of corruption persists. Politicians, public officers and businesses collude to create and profit from fraudulent acts, including inflated contracts. This is also common in Nigeria, where between 2009 and 2014, about USD$2 billion was salvaged from inflated contracts by the government agency set up to vet procurement.
Even multinational companies from the least corrupt countries gain from Africa’s corrupt political elite. For example, in 2011, UK’s Shell and Italy’s ENI paid USD$1.1 billion to Nigerian officials for access to an oilfield currently worth USD$500 billion. US tyre firm Goodyear paid more than USD$3.2 million in bribes to Angolan and Kenyan government officials in order to win supply contracts.
The pressure on companies to indulge in corruption is considerable in Africa. According to data from the World Bank, 71% of enterprises in Sierra Leone, 66.2% in Tanzania, 64% in Angola, 75.2% in Congo and 63% in Mali expect to give “gifts” to secure government contracts.
The ethical dilemma for business managers is that refusing to pay bribes can cost their companies contracts, licences and revenues. Essentially, good companies which do not yield to extortion may lose out to bad competitors who do. Consequently, most companies yield to corruption or stay silent. Speaking up can make them targets for political witch hunts and discrimination.
A much deeper reason for the private sector’s inactivity is that managers simply lack the political skills required to shape their business environments. This deficiency arises because the link between political institutions and economic markets has not received adequate attention in business schools. So the schools are turning out managers with good knowledge of business but inadequate understanding of public governance and inability to influence public institutions.
Most people, including business managers, feel powerless when dealing with corrupt government officials. They regard official institutions as too powerful to take on and see corrupt practices, such as bribery, as unchangeable. But with good education and training, this can change.
<h2>African business schools can help</h2>
Corruption is multi-faceted. So there is no simple solution for it. It must be battled on all fronts. Business schools can do their part by developing competence to confront corruption.
Some in Africa have already done so: three business schools introduced an anti-corruption programme sanctioned by the United Nations into their classrooms.
But much more can be done. Business schools should teach business-government relations, or corporate political activity. This is crucial because many business managers don’t know how to influence their political environments even though they are affected by government policies. Students and managers may be taught ethics in schools, but ethical values are difficult to uphold in contexts where corruption is highly endemic, such as Africa.
If the fight against corruption in Africa is to succeed, business managers must learn to engage public officers differently. The ability to do this can be developed in business schools.
Students and managers need to learn about political strategies that can change the way institutions work. Techniques for ad hoc management of bribery are no longer enough. Companies can, for example, present a united front against corruption so that none can be singled out for “punishment”.
The business community could also learn to self regulate by refusing to deal with corrupt companies, as was recently reported in South Africa. Collective campaigns for public procurement transparency can also prevent politicians from using the private sector to plunder State funds. Inaction breeds corruption, as seen in Kenya’s USD$1 billion Anglo Leasing scandal.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87405/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />African business schools are valuable in the fight against corruption. They can take bold steps to review their curricula and promote active corporate citizenship. When they see what a difference they can make, the continent may begin to shake off a major hindrance to its development.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Business schools have a role to play in fighting corruption in Africa

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Many consumers are repeatedly caught up in the same cycle of sales and promotions around the festive season. Consumers recklessly spend their hard-earned cash and bonuses on goods and services that they did not budget for.

Don’t let #BlackFriday sale end with a black listing

Rohen d’Aiglepierre and Amélie Aubert, AFD (Agence française de développement), and Pierre-Jean Loiret, Agence universitaire de la francophonie (AUF)
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African countries have worked hard to improve children’s access to basic education, but there’s still significant work to be done. Today, 32,6 million children of primary-school age and 25,7 million adolescents are not going to school in sub-Saharan Africa. The quality of education also remains a significant issue, but there’s a possibility the technology could be part of the solution. The digital revolution currently under way in the region has led to a boom in trials using information and communication technology (ICT) in education – both in and out of the classroom.
A study carried out by the French Development Agency (AFD), the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), Orange and Unesco shows that ICT in education in general, and mobile learning in particular, offers a number of possible benefits. These include access to low-cost teaching resources, added value compared to traditional teaching and a complementary solution for teacher training.
This means that there’s a huge potential to reach those excluded from education systems. The quality of knowledge and skills that are taught can also be improved.
<h2>The irresistible digital revolution</h2>
Access to means of communication is now a key part of daily life for the vast majority of people living in Africa. Mobile telephone prices and the cost of communication have dropped. Mobile telephone use has increased from 5% in 2003 to 73% in 2014. There are 650 million mobile phone owners on the continent (more than the US and Europe combined) and 3G mobile networks are growing rapidly.
Costs are falling and rural areas will soon be reachable thanks to a number of developments. These include undersea cables connecting Africa to other continents, fibre-optic cables that provide connectivity within the continent and recent satellite connection plans. Access to wired Internet remains low with 11% of households connected. But access to mobile Internet is already helping the region catch up. Smartphone penetration levels should reach 20% in 2017.
This rapid expansion of mobile Internet services is already contributing to the region’s economic and social development. This is particularly the case in areas such as financial inclusion (mobile banking), health (mobile health) and farmers’ productivity.
Given the features of mobile telephones (voice calling, text messaging) and smartphones (reading texts and documents, MP3, images and video) and their wide availability, their potential for improving access and quality of educational services is also boundless.
M-learning (or m-education) – educational services via a connected mobile device – is the main lever for growth in educational information and communication technology and for making content available. This could be for learning (teacher training, learner-centred teaching, tests) or making up for the lack of data for education system management.
<h2>New technologies for learning</h2>
Mass communication technology has been used as a principal driver of education in Africa since the 1960s. Countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Niger and Senegal developed major programmes using radio and then television to promote basic education, improve teacher training and even teaching pupils directly. These programmes reached a high number of pupils at a relatively low cost. But results in terms of academic performance remain difficult to evaluate.
The mass distribution of computer hardware then took over in the 1990s. Many national and international programmes started to concentrate on equipping schools with computers to facilitate digital education and offer new educational media in the form of educational software and CD-ROMs. Use was mainly centred on schools. But trials were often launched without clear pedagogical objectives and state-defined policy frameworks.
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Digital Services for Education in Africa</figcaption></figure>
The arrival of personal computers in the 2000s facilitated the individualisation of school ICT. The US One Laptop per Child project, launched in several African countries in 2005, aimed to equip schools with laptops at low cost.
Nearly 2 million teachers and pupils are involved in this programme across the world. More than 2.4 million computers (at a cost of around $200 including an open teaching platform) have been delivered. Evaluations show that the use of portable or fixed computers in the classroom has only a limited effect on pupils’ academic performance. But it may have a positive impact on certain cognitive abilities if pupils can use their computers at home in the evening.
<h2>Contents and uses</h2>
Since 2010 the large-scale diffusion of mobile communications technology has transformed practices with easier access to educational resources in and outside school. The arrival of low-cost, low-consumption smartphones and tablets allows ICT in education to gradually move out of the school environment.
There has been a shift from a tool-based approach to one that’s centred on content and use. These mobile tools, particularly tablets, offer important opportunities to tackle the lack of books and textbooks. The distribution of Kindle-style readers to 600,000 children in nine African countries has seen a considerable impact on reading and on pupils’ results in educational tests.
The sending of text messaging containing short lessons, multiple choice tests or audio recordings have also been shown to have an important effect on teachers. This is also true of MOOCs (massive open online courses) adapted to African countries’ needs and capacities.
The cross-fertilisation of teaching models and tools has broadened the potential of information and communication technology in education. Some technologies, perceived as outdated, are undergoing a partial revival thanks to the combination of media that can be used in any single project. For example radio and television programmes are inexpensive and attract a considerable audience. Combined with Internet and mobile phones they provide promising educational results.
The BBC’s Janala English-instruction programme for the people of Bangladesh is a good example of cooperation between very diverse actors.
<h2>What are the conditions for success?</h2>
Most African countries are showing an interest in technology in education. But a range of conditions must be satisfied to ensure that they are deployed efficiently within the educational landscape. This includes:
<ul>
<li>Responding to technical and economic constraints</li>
<li>Responding to users’ needs and strengthening their capacities</li>
<li>Finding sustainable funding models</li>
<li>Facilitating effective multi-stakeholder collaboration.</li>
</ul>
Although the time for innovation and experiment will never end, now is the moment to put systems and strategies in place for moving to the next level, particularly by setting up stakeholder coalitions. ICT will not resolve all of Africa’s education problems. But it can help to fundamentally change the current paradigm of skills development systems.
<hr />
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85937/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />This article was co-authored with Erwan Lequentrec (Orange Labs) and Francesc Pedró (Unesco). The text is based on “Digital Services for Education in Africa”, written by David Ménascé and Flore Clément.
Rohen d’Aiglepierre, PhD, chargé de recherche « Capital humain », AFD (Agence française de développement); Amélie Aubert, Chef de projet « Éducation, formation, emploi », AFD (Agence française de développement), and Pierre-Jean Loiret, Responsable du numérique éducatif, Agence universitaire de la francophonie (AUF)
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How digital technology can help reinvent basic education in Africa

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CNBC Africa spoke with Nigerian former President Goodluck Jonathan on the challenges Nigeria faces in preparing students for the professional workplace and role education could play in advancing Africa’s economic growth.

Education crucial for growth, development – Jonathan

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CNBC Africa&#8217;s Fifi Peters discussed the currents state of education in Nigeria with President Goodluck Jonathan and what needs to be done to take it to the next level.

Why Nigeria’s current education is good and bad – Jonathan

Peter von Loesecke | MBA Tour
Investing in education and the right skills have become vital elements to a country’s economic growth, development and competitiveness in a global setting.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-39050 size-full" src="http://cnbc.africa/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/education_shutterstock_155347391.jpg" alt="The truth behind S.A's decision to allow 20% as a maths pass mark" width="800" height="600" />
According to a SA government statement at a WEF workshop entitled “Shaping the Future of Education and Skills,” the Minister in the Presidency Mr. Jeff Radebe said: “We are all eminently aware that competing in today’s globally interconnected, and almost daily shifting, economy is a complex affair. Our countries not only need advanced education, both technical and vocational, [but also] they need dynamic, fast-paced and ever evolving skills, and also, a flexible workforce that can adjust to these rapid shifts in demand.”
The demand for highly qualified business leaders is growing at a significant rate. Research and trends over the years indicate that the critical skills of tomorrow include not only problem-solving and creativity, but also innovation, design thinking, adaptability and communication skills — not to mention high levels of personal accountability.
Furthermore, <a href="http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_EGW_FOJ_Africa.pdf">The Future of Jobs and Skills in Africa</a> report highlights that education and work in Sub-Saharan Africa will determine the livelihoods of nearly a billion people in the region and drive growth and development for generations to come. As one of the youngest populations in the world, it is imperative that adequate investments are made in education and learning that holds value in the labour market and prepares citizens for the world of tomorrow.
Africa’s role as a hub for economic growth and empowerment opportunities continues to gather pace. There do however remain critical challenges, in particular the need to create a significant number of jobs for the growing populations, as well as develop home-grown business leaders able to access global markets and drive growth in a sustainable and inclusive manner.
One of the key skills future leaders will need is the ability to learn and adapt at a rapid pace, and this can be achieved through studying for an MBA. The degree enables students to become innovative and dynamic managers in a broad range of industries and sectors, including entrepreneurial organisations as well as private and public institutions. The programme helps develop strategic, innovative, and entrepreneurial thinking in a global business context.
The MBA essentially involves understanding how businesses and organisations can be transformed to a competitive advantage. While the MBA degree is an end result, it is how one is taught to think during MBA study that is most important for business transformation.
Due to technology and innovation in most industries, services and products have become specialised and production processes are more sophisticated than ever. Several jobs these days require workers with advanced skills and higher levels of education. Therefore, the overarching value of an MBA lies in its ability to accelerate learning. In a world in which information comes at us from all angles, this is fundamentally important. However, as leaders, MBA graduates cannot just do this for their personal learning: they need to build and develop organisations that learn rapidly. Building the right talent for Africa&#8217;s jobs of today and tomorrow is critical.
I believe an MBA is an essential qualification for promotion in certain industries like Finance and Management Consulting.  An MBA combined with other experience like engineering or operations can help someone differentiate themselves in the workplace.
It is additionally an essential qualification to understand how strong brands prevail in the marketplace, why well-managed distribution channels often define market success rather than the product itself, and how powerful supply chains become a competitive global advantage.
The actual significance of an MBA is invaluable, and it is well worth the cost if you have the right combination of experience, motivation to succeed, and a career path in mind.  Many successful entrepreneurs began their careers in business, but were able to exploit “disrupters” in their industries to build a new business model for delivering goods and services after completing their MBA
In order to attract and retain skilled workers, then, it is important for organisations to strike the right balance between developing these new skills and offering strong economic incentives. Increasing attainment levels, better employment prospects, and the higher earnings that come with higher educational attainment can all contribute to growth and prosperity.
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An increase in MBA credentials yields positive economic results

Peter von Loesecke | The MBA Tour
With education being the most powerful tool that can change the world, The MBA Tour has successfully lived up to making an impact by taking the first step in providing unique opportunities for personal interaction between top international business schools and potential students to study abroad.
On Thursday, 12 October the annual MBA Tour hosted and featured top business schools from North America and Europe, where individuals saw top business schools which included: UPenn Wharton, Columbia, Chicago Booth, Toronto Rotman, and more.
“It was great to be in South Africa again this year, where we had 322 people register for the event compared to last year. We had representatives from business schools that conducted specific talks, panels, and presentations which all gave insight on the importance of studying abroad and how this can benefit individuals. This tour also showcased that MBAs abroad are not only for a higher LSM, but rather those who are determined and driven to achieve their goals,” says Peter von Loesecke, CEO &amp; Managing Director of The MBA Tour.
Based on research it is clear that there is a definite increase in the motivation to study towards an MBA. In 2014 alone, some of South Africa’s leading business schools recorded high registration numbers for prospective students enlisting for a Masters of Business Administration (MBA)<a href="https://www.moneyweb.co.za/archive/record-high-mba-enrolments-at-sa-business-schools/">[</a>1]. However ,an MBA combined with other experience like engineering or operations can help someone with that experience to differentiate themselves in the workplace.  “It is an essential qualification to understand how strong brands prevail in the marketplace, as well as why well managed distribution channels often define market success rather than the product itself, and how powerful supply chains become a competitive global advantage”, says von Loesecke.
The MBA Tour also emphasised that studying abroad is not something that is impossible and completely out of reach. The main focus of this tour was to bring top business schools from across the world to meet and build relationships with potential MBA students in Johannesburg, as well as to open up valuable channels of communication.
“The MBA is definitely worth the cost if you have the right combination of experience, motivation to succeed, and career path in mind. Many successful entrepreneurs began their careers in industry, but were able to exploit “disrupters” in their industries to build a new business model for delivering goods and services. We are looking forward to seeing how many South Africans seize the opportunity and enrol following this tour,” concluded von Loesecke.
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