As African universities pursue enhanced graduate employability, job creation and knowledge transfer for sustainable development, they must be entrepreneurial in teaching, increase entrepreneurial orientation within study programmes and support start-up companies – along with innovative initiatives to promote cooperation with business.

This emerged from interviews with speakers at a workshop on 19 May titled, ‘From employability to job creation. How to create effective university-business ecosystems in Africa’. It formed part of the UNESCO World Higher Education Conference (WHEC2022) themed ‘Reinventing Higher Education for a Sustainable Future’.

Status and significance

Professor Patrick Shamba Bakengela, the director of the Congolese German Centre for Microfinance at the Protestant University in the Democratic Republic of Congo, told University Word News that there is limited cooperation between universities in Africa and the business sector.

“Sometimes, business is invited to participate in conferences, but it is not sufficient,” Bakengela added.

Improved cooperation, he said, “will help to improve the situation in Africa through enhancing graduate employability and job creation”.

Mark Vlek de Coningh, the team leader of partnerships and programmes at the Netherlands Universities Foundation for International Cooperation, or NUFFIC, the Dutch organisation for internationalisation in education, and Christoph Hansert, the head of the Development Co-operation and Transnational Programmes at the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), in a message to University World News said university-business cooperation fosters opportunities and creates livelihoods for young Africans.

“African universities must not be isolated from the needs of African society … [they] have an important role to play in supporting the development of countries and communities,” De Coningh and Hansert said.

Expanding further, consultant Alvira Fisher, the former director of Stellenbosch University LaunchLab in South Africa, which functions as a business accelerator and boosts entrepreneurship on campus, told University World News: “Collaboration between African universities and the business sector offers a great opportunity to make a difference.

“It seems relative to other entrepreneurial thriving economies that Africa still has material strides to take to reach an effective ecosystem between higher education institutions and the private sector.

“University-business cooperation can be a game changer as graduates hold a unique combination of theory and next-generation reality when leaving university and the business sector, [in turn], has the know-how and skills to harness these new and young skills to find innovative ways to bring enhanced change into the industry,” Fisher said.

Challenges

Bakengela said the main challenge facing university-business cooperation in Africa is a misunderstanding on the areas of cooperation in a win-win situation because, sometimes, universities are seen as producing theoretical knowledge, whereas businesses are seen as focusing on the practical aspect and ignoring theoretical aspects.

“In Africa, we must improve our understanding between theory and practice … a good theory is the understanding of [the] causality of things – it is practical, not theoretical,” Bakengela explained.

“The curriculum is sometimes not adapted to challenges seen on the ground [within the business sector] in Africa,” he added.

Fisher added that “finding time to communicate and create a flowing dialogue is another challenge facing university-business cooperation in Africa”.

“Little insight is gained when information is implied,” Fisher pointed out.

To be business-ready, Fisher said, African university graduates needed a lot of support when completing the academic process as there are often workplace, marketplace and consumer skills deficits that will form the bases of the next steps a graduate has to undergo.

“Supporting entrepreneurship and job creation provides the private sector with the workforce needed along with helping in kick-starting the career of the future professional significantly, allowing them to flourish with confidence rather than taking time to learn from failures,” Fisher added.

An integrated approach

De Coningh and Hansert also emphasised the need to consider learning pathways more holistically.

“An integrated approach, which also brings in business, venture capital and mentorship by businesswomen and men, both nationally and internationally, is needed.

“A good example could be to incorporate fully accredited quality internships as part of university study programmes to link business fundamentals with education fundamentals.

“Setting up business incubators and units for promoting industry-university relations at all levels will also support knowledge exchange between the different parties,” they said.

An interesting example could be the Higher Education Institutions and Business Partners in Germany and in Developing Countries programme that was organised by DAAD, and funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to De Coningh and Hansert.

The programme is intended to promote the transfer of knowledge between higher education institutions and industry in order to contribute to the interlinking of institutions of higher education and industry and to expand the dialogue.

It includes several African countries, namely, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia.

Towards effective university-business ecosystems

To tackle challenges facing university-business cooperation in Africa, Bakengela said new solutions were needed to help poor people to access the economy through cooperation between African universities and national, regional and international businesses.

“We should encourage formal cooperation between university and business, mainly, to create a disruptive innovation that we enable people that are excluded to have access to new products and markets,” Bakengela indicated.

He also suggested that universities in Africa have to be entrepreneurial in teaching and must give students the opportunities to experiment ideas in the market and if possible to sell their ideas to businesses.

Fisher added that “sponsored engagement connecting stakeholders must be established, shared agendas and strategies across sectors must be formulated and establishing new initiatives to create training grounds for new innovations from within the academic sector to find a way to test theory in the reality of business” [was necessary].

“Other approaches include establishing online tools designed for collaboration and making connections across geographies possible along with organising programmes that not only bring stakeholders together, but create a strategic connection point to tackle sector problems collaboratively,” Fisher suggested.

To set up effective university-business ecosystems, Fisher stated that “African universities must also increase entrepreneurial orientation within study programmes and support start-up companies through the early introduction into practical entrepreneurial steps to undertake as entrepreneurship is more than just a brilliant idea and what we see online on social media”.

“Work towards value creation takes a lot of work behind the scenes if this can be added to academic learning. We might get a head start with our programme graduates on the continent,” Fisher emphasised.

“University-business ecosystems exist in Africa but, as entrepreneurial practitioners, we should challenge ourselves on whether they are accessible enough and if entrepreneurial ideation is given enough social capital to survive the journey,” she concluded.

UNIVERSITY WORLD NEWS

IT is a dismal situation for the South African labour market, warns University of the Western Cape (UWC) economist, Professor Derek Yu, as the Statistics South Africa’s 2022 Quarter Labour Force Survey first quarter data has been released on 31 May.

Yu noted that South Africa will have a very tough time ahead, just to revert to the pre-COVID labour market level, not to mention to promote youth employment and entrepreneurship more rapidly in the years ahead.

He said the current overall trends show, upon examining people aged 15-65 years at the time of the survey, that the number of employed decreased by close to 1.5 million between 2020 in the first quarter – just before lockdown started in the last week of March 2020 – and 2022 in the first quarter.

In addition, the first quarter of 2022 was a time when half of the SA adult population was either partially or fully vaccinated, while unemployment increased by 0.79 million. Furthermore, the labour force participation rate (LFPR) dropped by 3.5 percentage points, most likely because some people felt discouraged from seeking work anymore due to the disruptive lockdown restrictions.

This happened while the unemployment rate went up by more than 4 percentage points to 34.5%, from 30.1% in the first quarter of 2020.

“We can be almost 100% certain that the National Development Plan (NDP) labour market goal of dropping the country’s unemployment rate to 6% by the end of 2030 will not be achieved unless a miracle happens and the unemployment rate speedily drops by 3.5 percentage points per annum in the next 8 years,” said Yu.

“Already experiencing a stagnant real GDP annual growth rate of about 1% per annum in 2014-2019, South Africa suffered an abrupt 6.4% decline in real GDP growth in 2020, before enjoying a growth of “only” 4.9% in 2021. At the time of writing, the International Monetary Fund predicted that South Africa’s real GDP would only increase by a moderate 1.9% in 2022 and 1.4% in 2023. Hence, to expect the country’s unemployment rate to go down to 6% by 2030 is an almost impossible ask.”

Suffering the greatest decline in employment between 2020Q1 and 2022Q1 were:

Africans (accounting for 75% of decline of employment during the 2-year period.
The three youngest age cohorts (accounting for nearly 80% of job losses) – further worsening youth unemployment in the country.

Those without Matric (representing 80% of employment decrease during the two years). This finding is not surprising, given the structural change in the economy, as the less educated and skilled ones are relatively more likely to lose their jobs during the economic lockdown.

Service workers as well as craft and related trades occupation categories – these two categories involve close face-to-face contact with customers, and hence were most likely worst affected by the lockdown restrictions. They represented 22% and 21% of employment decline, respectively.

Yu explains, “When only considering the employees, employment loss was the greatest (accounting for a huge 47% share of total job loss) amongst employees who reported working for a large enterprise with at least 50 employees. This result is not surprising, as it is understandable that the owners of these large enterprises need to cut labour input cost by retrenching some of the employees,“ he noted.
“It is also concerning that 28.4% of job losses happened to employees who reported working in small enterprises with only one to four staff. This result implies some micro-enterprises failed to survive under the difficult circumstances during the lockdowns of the past two years.”

SUPPLIED| Professor Derek Yu is a Full Professor and Chair: Economics in the Department of Economics at UWC. For more information about studying economics at UWC.

NORTH West Province has renamed the provincial bursary scheme, which is aimed at benefitting thousands of students from poor backgrounds, to the late ANC Youth League (ANCYL) stalwart, Victor Thebe Sifora.

The bursary scheme is aimed at preserving the legacy of Sifora as an activist, scholar and struggle veteran.

It will also provide financial support to students with poor backgrounds, granting them opportunity to further their studies in different institutions of higher learning.

North West Premier, Bushy Maape, said over R4 million has already been set aside for the bursary scheme in the current financial year. Since 2016 the bursary has benefited over 800 students.

In his address during the launch at the Mahikeng campus at the North West University., Maape appealed to business and other social partners to help the Bursary Scheme raise funds to enable government to increase its intake of beneficiaries.

The launch was attended by Local Mayors, Councilorsy, MEC for the Department of Education, Wendy Matsemela and the Sifora family members.

Also present at the launch was a delegation from North West University led by Potchefstroom Campus Deputy Vice Chancellor, Daryl Baila.

“Our plan is to see more learners particularly from rural areas and disadvantaged backgrounds benefiting from this scheme. It is through education that we can change the lives of our people for the better. But education helps us to develop a new set of skills that can assist in addressing a number of challenges confronting our province,” Maape said.

Maape maintained the North West is beaming with men and women of high ethical standards and astuteness whose names must be celebrated in preserving their legacy and the heritage of the province.

“Sifora was a remarkable person and part of preserving his legacy is to make sure that we create socio-economic opportunities for the youth. This will ultimately alleviate challenges of poverty, unemployment, substance abuse and other social ills bedeviling our communities,” said Maape.

“It is my firm believe that the renaming of this scheme will re-ignite interest among the youth to study further but critically emulate Sifora’s principles which were confined within the realm of servitude and selflessness.”

Sifora – who was born in Mopyane Village in the then-Madikwe district in North West in 1914 – was one of the founding members of the ANCYL along with Oliver Thambo, Nelson Mandela, Anton Lembede and Walter Sisulu.

He was also a member of Seoposengwe, an official opposition party in then Bophuthatswana. He had an illustrious career as an academic, principal and teacher.

INSIDE EDUCATION