A few lessons Africa, Zimbabwe can borrow from Har...

A few lessons Africa, Zimbabwe can borrow from Harvard

Imagine Charles Mutemera leading a session on the art of client/agency relationships in building a successful brand while sharing Dicomm's experience in working with Econet

Benjamin T Juru

I recently had an opportunity to attend on campus classes at Harvard.
This was an eye opening experience and made me reflect on differences with the Zimbabwean set up, which is representative of education in most African countries.

It made me realize that we have an opportunity to profoundly improve our higher and tertiary education in the following ways:

Course content

Our course content should be made relevant in the present world. We should analysing case studies of successful companies in Zimbabwe.

For example we need to learn what made Econet, Delta etc so successful with their cases packaged in academic formats.

Do we lack qualified academics who can write case studies on our successful businesses, entrepreneurs and these be used as course content?

Delivery

Classes shouldn't be boring delivery of dry lectures all the time. Lecturers should bring in industry experts to lead different sessions.

I can imagine Charles Mutemera leading a session on the art of client/agency relationships in building a successful brand while sharing Dicomm's experience in working with Econet.

Who wouldn't love that!

Not only would it make things more real, it also extends networking and offers two way insights because learners are also teachers.

Leaders as lecturers

How can we get industry leaders like Charles Msipa, Lance Mambondiani and others in different fields taking MBA classes?

These people have demonstrated the art of successful corporate leadership and I can imagine them teaching at UZ/NUST and other institutions.

Colleges could attract students based on the calibre and number of the corporate leaders that they can attract to their faculties.

Collaboration

Our education needs to change, the idea of sitting in a three lecture studying academic theories based on foreign scenarios should now be outdated.

Our curriculum should promote collaboration through group works, group activities and in class participation which involve organisations that are operating in the environment in which we expect our graduates to venture into, and conquer.

A few notable examples we can convert into academic course content include Yanaya, Econet, Delta, Cimas, EcoCash, Fresh In A Box, Innscor and many others.

Conclusion

We cannot keep on producing graduates in cramming, who lack the practical academic grounding necessary for them to succeed in the corporate environment.

It is no surprise that corporates are always complaining about the quality of graduates being churned out.

Benjamin T Juru is Digital Transformation Enthusiast and Evangelist with vast experience in social media and content marketing as well as SEO and SEM for big Zimbabwean brands.