FROM THE CEO
A YEAR TO REMEMBER
AMBA & BGA CEO Andrew Main Wilson celebrates a record-breaking year of growth for both organisations and an outstanding number of attendees at the global and Latin America deans & directors conferences, as well as looking forward to the 2024 annual Excellence Awards
O
ur 2022/23 financial year ended on 30 September and I am delighted to say it was another record-breaking period for both AMBA and BGA.
being able to apply for joint accreditation in a flexible manner has proved very popular, with existing accredited AMBA schools saving both time and money, compared to applying for each accreditation separately. In fact, more than 100 of our AMBA- accredited schools have now become BGA members and it is certainly worth bearing in mind that if you are an AMBA-accredited school, you are eligible for free BGA membership. Our financial reserves are stronger than ever and put us in a healthy financial position. This is an important consideration for all organisations at present, particularly given the global geopolitical and economic uncertainty that is currently prevailing. Now that the global business school community has recovered from the effects of the pandemic and schools are able to travel internationally again, we were delighted to note record attendance at our Global Deans & Directors Conference in Seville in May and our Latin America Deans & Directors Conference in Mexico City in September. This proves once again that there is no effective substitute for personal relationship building through
face-to-face networking. We are fortunate to be working in a people-oriented industry, where international partnerships are crucial in building world-class, international business schools, so global networking in person has become essential. Meanwhile, we have received a record number of entries across all categories for our 2024 annual Excellence Awards and I am delighted to say that the quality of the shortlisted entries is higher than ever. We look forward to welcoming many of you to our gala awards dinner, which will be held in London at the Park Plaza Riverbank hotel on Friday 19 January. Finally, I would like to mention price inflation, at a time when the cost of almost everything in life seems to be rising exponentially. We feel sensitive to the cost- pressures facing business schools around the world and so we are making every effort to minimise cost increases to our fees, whether for accreditation, membership or to attend our conferences. These have all risen only slightly over the past 10 years, as we continue to strive to provide value for money to our customers in everything that we deliver.
Over the past 12 months, our AMBA- accredited schools network grew to 297, since we accredited 10 new schools, while six of our Russian schools became dormant. We were particularly proud to welcome our first AMBA-accredited schools in Bulgaria, Romania and Estonia, as the network continues to expand geographically. We only launched BGA in January 2019, yet our BGA family of member schools has sky-rocketed to 260. This is an even more remarkable feat when you consider that for almost half of BGA’s life so far, none of us were able to travel internationally and meet customers face to face due to Covid restrictions. Our BGA-accredited portfolio has now grown to 37 schools. Some 28 of those 37 institutions succeeded in gaining BGA accreditation at the same time as their AMBA accreditation or reaccreditation. Our offer of
38 | Ambition NOVEMBER 2023
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