South Africa’s business schools are reimagining their executive education offerings to keep pace with a rapidly changing environment, as demand grows for digital skills, ethical leadership and flexible, purpose-driven learning.
Faced with persistent challenges like youth unemployment and policy uncertainty, schools are pivoting to ensure they remain relevant, particularly to a younger generation of professionals with very different expectations of education.
“The landscape of higher education is shifting,” says Joseph Sekhampu, director of the North-West University (NWU) Business School. “So are the aspirations of younger professionals and the expectations of the world they will lead. In response, we are rethinking what it means to educate for impact, relevance and resilience.”
At several schools, this change is being guided by new leadership. Stellenbosch Business School, Johannesburg Business School (JBS), the Tshwane School for Business & Society and the Durban University of Technology (DUT) Business School have all named new heads in recent months.
Stellenbosch’s January 1 elevation to senior director of Chris van der Hoven, previously head of its executive development arm, ended a 15-month hiatus after the sudden departure of UK academic and former director Mark Smith in September 2023. Smith was the second Brit in 10 years to quit the school before his contract expired, after John Powell in 2013.
Van der Hoven, who is South Africa-born and bred, brings the international nous that Stellenbosch is evidently seeking, having spent 12 years teaching at the UK’s Cranfield School of Management and three years as a senior fellow at Cambridge.
At JBS, part of the University of Johannesburg, Adri Drotskie was named acting dean after Randall Carolissen, who had led the school since March 2021, took early retirement at the end of 2024. Until then, Drotskie was director of the management school in the university’s college of business and economics. Before that, she was head of research and faculty development at Henley Business School Africa.
She says her immediate priority is “to keep everything running smoothly” until a permanent dean is appointed.
Hlengani Mathebula has no such problem at Tshwane, where he is the full-time successor to Kobus Jonker, who spent almost six years as director of the school, part of the Tshwane University of Technology.
Mathebula was previously an academic at the University of Limpopo’s Turfloop Graduate School of Leadership. He has extensive business experience, particularly in banking. He was a senior executive at Absa and FNB and a strategist at the Reserve Bank and South African Revenue Service.
At the DUT Business School, director Pfano Mashau says the university plans to integrate the business school with the hotel school. This would allow the business school to expand its curriculum around the hospitality sector, a big industry in Durban and KwaZulu-Natal. The hotel school’s existing student accommodation would have the added advantage of being available for business students.
Mashau was previously an academic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
South African business schools continue to make their mark internationally. Few developments this year have showcased South Africa’s rising influence in global business education more than the milestone agreement between Harvard Business School, in the US, and the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business (GSB).
Director Catherine Duggan says the GSB is the first school in Africa to have its full collection of teaching cases published by Harvard Business Publishing’s Impact platform. The achievement, she says, “gives an African perspective a seat at the global table”, allowing students and executives worldwide to engage with authentic, nuanced African business challenges.
The school continues to expand its global footprint through, among other things, its customised executive education programmes, which recently earned a gold medal from the European Foundation for Management Development.
South Africa’s growing international influence applies particularly to Sub-Saharan Africa, where many schools offer programmes. In March the NWU Business School launched a PhD Hub for Africa.
Sekhampu says: “How can we support African scholars to produce research that is not only academically rigorous but socially transformative? Too often, doctoral education across the continent has been fragmented, underresourced and disconnected from local priorities. The hub addresses this by creating a pan-African academic ecosystem that reimagines the PhD journey as one rooted in collaboration, relevance and long-term impact.
“Transformation cannot be left to chance. It must be designed into the very architecture of learning.”
The hub’s first cohort includes students from Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and South Africa.
Digital and AI literacy have become central to executive education, with schools rushing to embed technology across curricula. Henley Business School Africa dean Jon Foster-Pedley says humanity must remain at the heart of technology in an AI world. It must be “human-led, human-centred and human-managed”. A business school of integrity “builds leaders not just for the next five years, but for the next 40”.
At a time when fears are increasing that AI could devastate employment, the Management College of Southern Africa says: “Rather than isolating AI as a standalone topic, we have woven [together] the thread of AI, business and society development and impact across the curriculum by embedding critical engagement with its ethical, economic, and social implications.”
Entrepreneurship is also firmly on the agenda. In August, Regenesys Education, which includes Regenesys Business School, will launch a school of entrepreneurship, intended to help budding and established entrepreneurs build scalable, investment-ready businesses.
Schools like Stellenbosch, the GSB and the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science already have established entrepreneurship programmes, but in a country with an appalling record for new-business failure for the want of necessary skills, all new relevant education is welcome.
Cobus Oosthuizen, dean of postgraduate studies at Boston City Campus and chair of the South African Business Schools Association, says: “South Africa’s business schools are positioning themselves as an agile, ethically grounded hub for management talent, one that can speak to local development priorities while staying firmly plugged into the global knowledge economy.”
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