The Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL) is to recruit more students spread across a larger number of African countries in the next year.
This is in line with the vision of both the mother institution, Unisa, and the business school’s strategy to contribute to the growth and development of Africa.
The school already has a track record in countries such as Ethiopia, Namibia, Kenya and Nigeria, often in partnership with other local and international institutions such as the Polytechnic of Namibia, Kenyatta University in Kenya and King’s College in London.
The recently launched Master of Business Leadership (MBL), the school’s flagship programme in Ethiopia, has drawn huge interest from both the public and private sector and is in its second year of intake.
Now the school is eyeing a further expansion into West and East Africa, including Uganda, Senegal and Zambia. But it is not crossing borders without caution.
Professor David Abdulai, the school’s executive director and chief executive, said the school is acutely aware that countries have different political and economic systems and unique cultural dynamics.
“We carefully look at these before we enter a country. We are really well versed in these distinguishing country-specific features thanks to, among others, the diversity of our faculty,” said Abdulai, whose Ghanian origin is serving the school well.
Abdulai said many South African companies venturing north encounter problems in their pursuit of new market opportunities because they have not sufficiently tuned into the local culture and system.
“What is acceptable in South Africa could be taboo in other cultures. It is your responsibility to be abreast of these cross-cultural nuances to avoid embarrassment to yourself, your institution and your country,” he said.
Both the pursuit of new markets by South African companies, which turn to the school for their management training needs as they start operations in other parts of Africa, and the difficulties some of them have faced have been drivers of the school’s reach into the continent.
But Abdulai said the school was also attracting significant numbers of civil servants to its MBL and executive education programmes. For example, in September and October 2008 the school developed and delivered a workshop on strategic management to the Nigerian bureau of public enterprise.
As they are full-time employees who don’t have the time to spend in lecture halls, students are attracted to the flexibility of school’s open distance learning delivery mode.
“The use of our electronic delivery system as part of our tuition model allows us to engage our students no matter where they are in the world, provided they have internet access, thus making distance irrelevant,” he said.