STRATEGY
The South African MBA In the decades since the country opened, South Africa’s business schools have embraced international accreditations, students and partnerships. While the country is moderately sized (at around 60 million people with a GDP of just over $400 billion) and is home to only a small fraction of the continent’s 1.2 billion people, South Africa can lay claim to three of Africa’s four triple-crown accredited schools – Stellenbosch Business School, UCT-GSB in Cape Town and GIBS in Pretoria – and eight of the continent’s 12 AMBA- accredited schools. These schools boast a wide range of memberships in global school networks, including GBSN, GNAM, CEMS, CoBS and GMAC, as well as a large number of bilateral partnerships. Such relationships create an unusually international group of students and faculty. South African business schools draw students from across the continent and around the world, but they also provide opportunities for local students to gain a global perspective and for international ones to gain a deeper understanding of Africa. The country’s unique history and regulatory approach, coupled with its enthusiasm for international accreditation and continuous improvement, have created an unusual management education sector. Many of the country’s business schools focus exclusively on postgraduate education and, while South African schools have joined their global peers in o ering degree programmes at many levels of experience and in several specialised areas of focus, the MBA remains the flagship degree across nearly all South African business schools. Unlike many of their global peers, however, South African schools have long been focused on enhancing the accessibility of their degrees. The government-mandated Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) process provides a path for successful managers with substantial experience to enter a degree programme without an undergraduate degree – a critical allowance for a country that so recently had explicit race-based restrictions and where access to education remains deeply unequal. In addition to this RPL pathway, reserved for students who can demonstrate their preparation through a rigorous process, the vast majority of South African business schools also o er a bridging degree in the form of a postgraduate diploma, equivalent to a one-year master’s of science degree common in much of Europe and North America. This diploma programme, generally taken by early- to-mid career professionals, is designed to ensure that managers who only studied for a three-year undergraduate degree are adequately prepared for higher levels of management – and a rigorous MBA. South African MBA programmes are noted for their intellectual rigour. As mandated by the regulator for tertiary education, the Council for Higher Education (CHE), MBA students must all complete a substantial piece of written research. This capstone research requirement gives alumni a chance to engage in in-depth research, structure a long paper and manage a substantial project. These projects require the close supervision of faculty members and many graduates go on to co-publish their work with supervisors. This focus on independent research reflects a broad implicit philosophy: that managers in Africa and beyond must leave an MBA programme able to think critically and in innovative ways.
BIOGRAPHIES
Mark Smith is director of the Stellenbosch Business School in Cape Town, where he leads a triple-accredited school specialising in post-graduate education. He is former faculty dean at Grenoble Ecole de Management where he also led the doctoral school. Prior to working in France, he was at Manchester Business School. Smith’s research interests focus on careers, working conditions, labour markets policy, working time and work-life integration Professor Morris Mthombeni is the dean of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS). Mthombeni is a senior lecturer who actively researches the intersection of the micro-foundations of corporate strategy and governance. He is one of the senior academics in the areas of environment of business, corporate strategy and innovation at GIBS. He lectures on the master’s, doctoral and executive education programmes, including the school’s flagship global executive development programme and Harvard Business School’s senior executive programme for Africa. He is also a board member of the Principles for Responsible Management Education Catherine Duggan is director of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. Her research examines the political economy of development in Africa. She has carried out work in two dozen countries over more than 20 years, including writing cases on Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe on topics such as macroeconomic volatility and political risk, extractive industries, institutions, finance and technology. Duggan was previously vice-dean at the African Leadership University School of Business, a new school in Rwanda; she was also a visiting scholar at Saïd Business School at Oxford University and served on the Harvard Business School faculty for nearly a decade, where she earned multiple awards
28 | Ambition OCTOBER 2023
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