Africa\u2019s business schools stand at a strategic inflection point, needing to decisively break with colonial structures of education and stop the continent from being a \u201cfield site\u201d for testing Western models.<\/p>\n
These are the observations made by the Wits Business School (WBS), one of South Africa\u2019s leading business schools, whose alumni include the likes of Investec boss Fani Titi and Absa CEO Kenny Fihla.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor too long, business schools on the continent have relied on borrowed case studies, transplanted theories and accreditation models that neither capture Africa\u2019s complex realities nor equip its graduates to re-engineer them,\u201d the authors say.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrue 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cInnovation 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nInnovation in African business education must entail a decisive break from imported orthodoxy, whether in curriculum design, scientific inquiry, technological adoption or governance practice. <\/p>\n
\u2014 \u00a0Maurice Radebe and Imhotep Alagidede <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Radebe, a former executive at petrochemical major Sasol, also serves as chair of the Association of African Business Schools.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
South Africa\u2019s leading business schools, including the UCT Graduate School of Business, University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB), University of Pretoria\u2019s Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), and WBS, consistently rank high. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBusiness education has traditionally been cast as a vehicle for knowledge transmission, producing graduates to feed managerial hierarchies in government, state corporations and private enterprise.<\/p>\n
Entrepreneurial role <\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cWhile this function remains important, the African condition requires a more activist and entrepreneurial role for schools of management.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
International rankings, graduate salary data and corporate recruitment statistics are still widely accepted as benchmarks of quality.<\/p>\n
However, these metrics obscure more meaningful outputs, such as the graduate\u2019s contribution to society and how business education serves the public interest, according to critics.<\/p>\n
Jon Foster-Pedley, dean and director at Henley Business School Africa, said African business schools should Africanise \u2014 but not as token case studies. <\/p>\n
He said if graduates can\u2019t read their own societies, the system has failed. <\/p>\n
However, Foster-Pedley warned that Africanisation must not become an inward\u2011looking replacement of one orthodoxy with another. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe harder truth is structural: you can decolonise the syllabus and still run a colonial university. Many schools are trapped by copied machinery \u2014 outdated degree templates, inherited funding logics, governance systems and ranking obsessions designed for northern universities in another era,\u201d Foster-Pedley said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opportunity is bigger than changing reading lists: Africa and the Global South are living the future first \u2014 complexity, inequality, youthful populations, rapid urbanisation, climate stress and technological leapfrogging.<\/p>\n
\u2018From Africa to the world\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cBusiness schools here should prototype the next model: solve African problems with global insight and feed African thinking back into global theory \u2014 \u2018from Africa to the world.\u2019 <\/p>\n
\u201cThat demands South\u2011South 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\u2019ll teach Frantz Fanon inside Oxford\u2019s architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s dual economy, arguing that for South Africa to realise inclusive growth, business schools must evolve from academic institutions into developmental partners.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents at WBS often report a sense of dissonance when taught to model consumer behaviour using frameworks developed for homogenous, externally affluent Western markets \u2014 frameworks that fail to capture the realities of informal trade, mobile money ecosystems, or collective forms of consumption,\u201d the research reads.<\/p>\n
\u201cSimilarly, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Africa\u2019s business schools stand at a strategic inflection point, needing to decisively break with colonial structures of education…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[210887,210876,210881,210899,210897,210896,210893,210883,210889,210885,210890,210891,51,210875,210886,210888,210879,210898,210895,3134,210878,210882,210894,210877,210880,16,15,210884,210892],"class_list":{"0":"post-700688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-africa-economic-development","9":"tag-africas-economic-development","10":"tag-african-business-curricula","11":"tag-african-business-education","12":"tag-african-business-innovation","13":"tag-african-business-schools","14":"tag-african-business-transformation","15":"tag-african-case-studies","16":"tag-african-education-reform","17":"tag-african-entrepreneurship","18":"tag-african-management-education","19":"tag-africentric-curricula","20":"tag-business","21":"tag-business-school-rankings","22":"tag-business-schools-transformation","23":"tag-collaboration-in-education","24":"tag-colonial-education-models","25":"tag-decolonise-business-schools","26":"tag-decolonising-business-education","27":"tag-entrepreneurship","28":"tag-entrepreneurship-in-africa","29":"tag-inclusive-economic-mobility","30":"tag-innovation-in-africa","31":"tag-maurice-radebe","32":"tag-south-south-collaboration","33":"tag-uk","34":"tag-united-kingdom","35":"tag-western-education-models","36":"tag-wits-business-school"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}