Speaking up for Africa

Are South African business schools really colonialised by Western teaching principles and content? Are they so focused on meeting American and European definitions of excellence that they ignore local and African priorities?

When Business Day ran a front-page story in January featuring research by Wits Business School (WBS) arguing that African business schools should shift away from Western-imported orthodoxy and focus on their societal impact rather than their international rankings, the comments section exploded.

Almost none were positive.

They included many predictable replies, insisting that business principles and practices, like maths and accounting, are universal and cannot be decolonialised; that entrepreneurship cannot be taught; and that many top-ranked local business schools are far too wedded to their international rankings to ever give them up.

As debatable as these points may be, none did justice to the underlying research article: “Reframing African Business Education through Collaboration, Innovation, and Impact” by WBS professors Maurice Radebe and Imhotep Alagidede.

The authors set out an ambitious, 20-year vision that they believe will require a “paradigmatic shift” in how local business schools understand their role and purpose.

Their core argument is that Africa’s developmental challenges demand much more from local business schools than that they be passive observers. They must become “civic entrepreneurs” that nurture firms, influence government policy, orchestrate innovation and achieve development.

This is a tall order. The FM canvassed several local business schools to find out if facilitating development is asking too much of teaching institutions or whether this is what they should be doing in a country with as many challenges as ours. The answer is unequivocally “yes” — this is exactly what they should be doing.

“The idea of a values-neutral business school is a relatively recent and increasingly tired invention,” says Henley Business School Africa dean Jon Foster-Pedley.

It is also the version of business education in which the world is losing faith. This includes the West, where MBA programmes have come in for much recent criticism for producing graduates who lack the operational skills to navigate today’s complex markets.

Foster-Pedley argues that every important business school was founded to solve a specific economic problem: Harvard, to professionalise American capitalism in the early 20th century; INSEAD, to knit postwar Europe back together; the Indian Institutes of Management, as instruments of industrialisation; and the London Business School, to address the national concern that Britain was losing its commercial intelligence.

“None of these institutions thought of themselves as neutral technical academies producing managers in the abstract,” he says. “They were civic projects from the beginning.”

So, no, says Foster-Pedley, schools are not being asked to take on a noble extra duty in Africa. “We are being given the chance to do what business schools should always have done and what most have stopped doing: build the institutional, entrepreneurial and intellectual fabric of the economies we sit inside.”

Rhodes Business School (RBS) director Owen Skae says that while the vision for “civic entrepreneurs” is ambitious, it correctly recognises that Africa’s developmental challenges require business schools to rethink their role far beyond traditional teaching.

The sector, he feels, needs to move “from talk to torque”. RBS is trying to introduce more torque through initiatives that support rapid incubation and entrepreneurial development.

“However, expecting business schools alone to create jobs and drive economic renewal is unrealistic, particularly given the funding and structural constraints we ourselves operate under,” he adds. “The government, private sector partners, mentors, investors and established entrepreneurs all need to come to the party.”

In other words, while business schools have a developmental role to play, this must be embedded within a broader ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship beyond the classroom — one that enables innovation, supports risk-taking and reduces friction for new ventures.

“South Africa still lacks many of those enabling conditions,” says Skae.

A new way of teaching and a new type of teacher

To give effect to their vision, Radebe and Alagidede argue that business schools must change the way they teach, turning classrooms into experiential “studios”, “sandboxes” and business “incubators” where students engage directly with real-world challenges.

They must also deepen the way they collaborate with each other, business and government to achieve meaningful change and overhaul the ways they evaluate their performance. In short, the paper implies that local business schools should stop chasing international accreditation and start counting what really matters — their local, socioeconomic impact.

The continent risks reproducing managerial elites detached from its developmental challenges, perpetuating dependency on imported frameworks and external accreditation

—  Maurice Radebe and Imhotep Alagidede

“Rankings and accreditation remain valuable, but they cannot constitute the sole measure of success,” the authors say.

They urge local business schools to adopt scorecards that prioritise developmental outcomes like small-business growth attributable to training, job creation, productivity improvements, reductions in inequality and contributions to environmental sustainability.

The danger, they warn, is that without a deliberate agenda to drive these changes, “the continent risks reproducing managerial elites detached from its developmental challenges, perpetuating dependency on imported frameworks and external accreditation”.

But is it fair to reward professors for how many jobs or small firms their students go on to create in a country like South Africa with sky-high structural unemployment, deeply entrenched poverty and significant economic constraints?

Skae believes it is neither entirely fair nor realistic to reward professors solely on job creation metrics, as there are too many variables beyond the control of academics or institutions. That said, he believes that if we want real-world outcomes, we will need a new cohort of “pracademics” — individuals who operate credibly in both academic and practical environments.

This, he says, will require more agile institutional models that embrace AI, startup methodologies, microcredentials, recognition of prior learning and Dragon’s Den-style engagements that bring real-world entrepreneurial pressure into the classroom.

Catherine Duggan, dean of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (GSB), says the school has renewed its programmes over the past five years, with direct input from employers, to ensure they are deeply rooted in the realities and challenges of the domestic environment.

A large proportion of coursework has been written by GSB faculty and speaks directly to the experience of African leaders and companies, she adds. Students also work on a wide variety of real problems faced by South African organisations, from large companies to small entrepreneurs, including in places like Philippi on the Cape Flats, where the GSB maintains a hub for teaching and community engagement.

So how do business schools avoid producing disconnected managerial elites?

“By treating the African economy as the curriculum, not the backdrop,” says Foster-Pedley. “By exposing students to ministries and informal traders and family-owned conglomerates and unicorn founders, not as field trips but as serious objects of analysis. And by bringing in faculty who have built things, run things, lost things and have something to say about why.”

You do not produce disconnected elites by teaching too few African case studies, he adds, but by not engaging with the texture of the domestic economy. Consequently, the fix is not to add African content to a Western curriculum; it is to teach “context-reading” as a primary professional skill.

In his experience, African leaders routinely experience situations that Western-trained executives have rarely seen. He sees this as a valuable teaching opportunity.

“The single most useful capacity we can develop in a senior leader is the ability to step into an unfamiliar environment, read what is actually happening, distinguish the local logic from imported assumptions and act sensibly,” he says.

“That capacity has no nationality. It is what makes a leader effective in Birmingham or Bulawayo, Geneva or Gauteng.”

Are South African business schools too obsessed with their international rankings?

“Yes,” says Skae. He believes the metrics they use are often “flawed and disconnected from developmental realities”. In some cases, rankings become “marketing instruments rather than meaningful indicators of societal contribution”.

However, he believes that international rankings still matter for global legitimacy, partnerships, student mobility and attracting international talent. But he agrees with Radebe and Alagidede that “impact” should be the lodestar of evaluation.

Duggan disagrees that international rankings are disconnected from local realities, saying the GSB’s global rankings and awards reflect its focus on impact and local relevance, rather than drawing focus away from them.

“GSB graduates are deeply committed to driving an innovative, inclusive and sustainable future for South Africa,” she says.

For instance, this year GSB associate professor Caitlin Ferreira was named MBA Programme Director of the Year by the Association of MBAs (AMBA), a global accreditation body. The award recognises changes she initiated in the programme, including the addition of the requirement that all MBA students work with a GSB-approved nonprofit organisation.

“We measure our ultimate success by the transformational impact our programmes have had on our graduates’ lives and careers, as well as by the tangible difference in areas like economic development, job creation and inclusive growth that our graduates, and the school itself, have been able to make,” says Duggan.

AMBA is one of the “big three” international accreditations. The others are EQUIS, run by the European Foundation for Management Development, and the US-based Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

Like Duggan, WBS interim director Logan Rangasamy disagrees that international accreditation agencies are pushing local business schools in an unwanted direction.

A business school can score well on every globally accepted metric and still produce graduates who hollow out the institutions they inherit ... We’ve all watched it happen

—   Jon Foster-Pedley

“I won’t go for accreditation in order to be colonised,” he says. “The agencies ask us what our mission is and help us towards that. Their principles and standards hold us to account in order to achieve what we want, not what they want. They don’t dictate our aims and outcomes.”

Foster-Pedley believes the problem with the current ranking-and-accreditation industrial complex is that it measures only a thin slice of what matters and treats that slice as the whole.

In his view, international accreditation systems were built for a particular kind of business school in a particular kind of economy and, as such, encode assumptions that are no longer universally correct, if they ever were.

“This makes them useful as a quality floor but dangerous as a definition of excellence,” he adds, noting that “a business school can score well on every globally accepted metric and still produce graduates who hollow out the institutions they inherit. We’ve all watched it happen.”

Still, Foster-Pedley thinks opting out of international accreditation would be a mistake.

“Cutting ourselves off from international validation would not make us more African; it would make us provincial,” he says. “Withdrawal would likely weaken partnerships, reduce international student flows and isolate African institutions intellectually at precisely the moment the continent needs greater influence in global debates, not less.”

The right move, many deans believe, is parallel development — to work with the main international accreditation agencies but also contribute to the African Association of Business Schools (AABS) accreditation system, launched almost a decade ago.

The thinking behind the AABS system was for African schools to develop their own scorecard — one that takes developmental contributions, institutional resilience and societal relevance seriously. The idea was not to replace but to complement global engagement.

“The goal is not to become less international but to stop confusing international with Western,” explains Foster-Pedley.

“The mistake some make is to treat decolonisation as anti-Western. The actual move is to treat the global canon as incomplete and to widen it. The next generation of global standards in management education is going to have to absorb what places like Lagos, Bengaluru, São Paulo and Cape Town have learnt about leading in compressed time and across radical heterogeneity. If we are not at the table shaping those standards, we have only ourselves to blame.”

Do South African business schools’ curricula need to be decolonised?

Perhaps the most controversial part of the WBS paper is the argument that existing business school curricula, typically rooted in imported orthodoxy, are inadequate in an African context.

It argues that global management scholarship marginalises African realities because it relies on case studies and theories developed for homogenous, affluent Western markets. These frameworks fail to capture, for example, the realities of informal trade, mobile money ecosystems or collective forms of consumption.

WBS academic director Jones Odei-Mensah, who edited the Radebe paper, says: “Business schools across Africa have made progress in setting their own agendas but still rely heavily on imported case studies. The paper is trying to call for a more African-targeted agenda.”

The paper argues that African business schools must become producers of original knowledge — and not just by developing local case studies but through “intellectual innovation”, where ideas and theories incubated in African universities influence global debates.

Skae agrees that local business schools need curricula that are far more contextually grounded in African realities — informal economies, township entrepreneurship, mobile finance ecosystems and hybrid forms of value creation — that do not necessarily fit traditional Western business frameworks.

He concedes that examples of uniquely African business theories are still too rare, though there are important emerging contributions, such as GG Alcock’s study of township economics (Kasinomics), which has helped shift understanding around informal markets and entrepreneurial behaviour in South Africa.

Across the continent there are also important innovations around mobile money ecosystems (such as Kenya’s successful mobile phone-based M-Pesa financial service), informal trade networks, collective consumption models and community-based entrepreneurship that are increasingly drawing global attention.

Expecting business schools alone to create jobs and drive economic renewal is unrealistic, particularly given the funding and structural constraints we ourselves operate under

—  Owen Skae

“If African business schools can combine intellectual innovation with practical impact, then we can move beyond ‘talk’ and finally generate the ‘torque’ needed for meaningful developmental change,” says Skae.

Foster-Pedley argues that African business has been the proving ground for an entire approach to operating in conditions of institutional incompleteness — what Western scholars are starting to term frugal innovation, leapfrogging, transient advantage and ambidextrous leadership.

“Almost none of this language acknowledges the African originators, but the ideas were field-tested here long before they were theorised in Cambridge or Stanford,” he says.

In fact, he believes that in the AI era, Africa may be sitting on the most valuable form of management capability to date — the ability to exercise judgment under conditions of genuine uncertainty.

The argument that local schools are in a privileged position to become the voice of the developing world in business education is not new. However, except for a couple of schools, the sector has largely failed to take advantage of this opportunity.

Cobus Oosthuizen, chair of the South African Business Schools Association, says: “There have been isolated attempts to lead the conversation, but perhaps we have not done as much as we could. We have a unique blend of circumstances and knowledge here, but we need to articulate it better.”

Foster-Pedley has another take. “We have spent 20 years debating whether we are good enough by other people’s standards, when the more important question was whether their standards were good enough for the world we are now all entering,” he says.

“The rest of the world will catch up. We should be ready to teach them.”