Africa’s business schools stand at a strategic inflection point, needing to decisively break with colonial structures of education and stop the continent from being a “field site” for testing Western models.

These are the observations made by the Wits Business School (WBS), one of South Africa’s leading business schools, whose alumni include the likes of Investec boss Fani Titi and Absa CEO Kenny Fihla.

Penned by professors Maurice Radebe, who recently left his role as the director of WBS, and Imhotep Alagidede, the research challenges African business schools to move beyond teaching and towards true transformation.

“For too long, business schools on the continent have relied on borrowed case studies, transplanted theories and accreditation models that neither capture Africa’s complex realities nor equip its graduates to re-engineer them,” the authors say.

“True innovation requires moving from teaching about entrepreneurship to building firms, from discussing technology to embedding it, and from consuming foreign intellectual frameworks to producing original African theories and enterprises.

“Innovation in African business education must entail a decisive break from imported orthodoxy, whether in curriculum design, scientific inquiry, technological adoption or governance practice. The broader implication is that African business schools must become coalition-centred institutions, with collaboration hardwired into their identity.”

Innovation in African business education must entail a decisive break from imported orthodoxy, whether in curriculum design, scientific inquiry, technological adoption or governance practice.

—  Maurice Radebe and Imhotep Alagidede

Radebe, a former executive at petrochemical major Sasol, also serves as chair of the Association of African Business Schools.

The research introduces the collaboration, innovation and impact (CCI Agenda) framework, which calls for stronger partnerships across academia, industry and policy; future-ready curriculums powered by AI, fintech and blockchain; and a shift from ranking-driven performance to measurable societal change.

South Africa’s leading business schools, including the UCT Graduate School of Business, University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB), University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), and WBS, consistently rank high.

Radebe and Alagidede warn that without a deliberate agenda for collaboration, innovation, and impact, the continent risks reproducing managerial elites detached from its developmental challenges, perpetuating dependency on imported frameworks and external accreditation.

“Business education has traditionally been cast as a vehicle for knowledge transmission, producing graduates to feed managerial hierarchies in government, state corporations and private enterprise.

Entrepreneurial role

“While this function remains important, the African condition requires a more activist and entrepreneurial role for schools of management.

“The next phase must reposition them as civic entrepreneurs, institutions that not only theorise but actively orchestrate innovation ecosystems, nurture firms, influence policy, and provide pathways for inclusive economic mobility. This reframing is not cosmetic; it represents a paradigmatic shift in how business schools justify their existence and evaluate their success.”

One of the criticisms levelled at business schools over the past decade is the fixation on measuring excellence in business education with outdated models that prioritise prestige over public value.

International rankings, graduate salary data and corporate recruitment statistics are still widely accepted as benchmarks of quality.

However, these metrics obscure more meaningful outputs, such as the graduate’s contribution to society and how business education serves the public interest, according to critics.

Jon Foster-Pedley, dean and director at Henley Business School Africa, said African business schools should Africanise — but not as token case studies.

He said if graduates can’t read their own societies, the system has failed.

However, Foster-Pedley warned that Africanisation must not become an inward‑looking replacement of one orthodoxy with another.

“The harder truth is structural: you can decolonise the syllabus and still run a colonial university. Many schools are trapped by copied machinery — outdated degree templates, inherited funding logics, governance systems and ranking obsessions designed for northern universities in another era,” Foster-Pedley said.

“The opportunity is bigger than changing reading lists: Africa and the Global South are living the future first — complexity, inequality, youthful populations, rapid urbanisation, climate stress and technological leapfrogging.

‘From Africa to the world’

“Business schools here should prototype the next model: solve African problems with global insight and feed African thinking back into global theory — ‘from Africa to the world.’

“That demands South‑South collaboration (Africa with Latin America and Asia) and a shift from rankings to tangible social, economic and environmental value, educating leaders for inclusive, sustainable prosperity. Decolonise rankings, funding and governance too, or you’ll teach Frantz Fanon inside Oxford’s architecture.”

In a provocative piece published last year, Phindile Mpithi, a Regent Business School academic, said business curriculums must respond to the realities of South Africa’s dual economy, arguing that for South Africa to realise inclusive growth, business schools must evolve from academic institutions into developmental partners.

The study by Radebe and Alagidede, who is also attached to WBS, reflects on the experiences of the 58-year-old school in teaching business in the African context, relying on Western experiences.

“Students at WBS often report a sense of dissonance when taught to model consumer behaviour using frameworks developed for homogenous, externally affluent Western markets — frameworks that fail to capture the realities of informal trade, mobile money ecosystems, or collective forms of consumption,” the research reads.

“Similarly, African entrepreneurs have noted that conventional risk models exclude their businesses because they do not fit Western templates of collateralisation or credit scoring. Such disjunctures illustrate why curriculums rooted in imported orthodoxy remain inadequate.”