Empowering tomorrow's African entrepreneurs and managers: the Global Business School Network

Abstract

The essay introduces an innovative low-cost knowledge-based approach to development cooperation: the Global Business School Network (GBSN). Since 2003 GBSN has been addressing a cross-cutting development issue which has been neglected or altogether ignored by Official Development Assistance institutions as well as private philanthropic funders: the extreme scarcity of well-trained local leaders and managers — ‘problem-solvers’ — in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as well as other low-income areas of the world. This shortage can be alleviated by sending Africans abroad for training, or by nurturing local training institutions by means of multi-year capacitybuilding efforts. GBSN opted for the latter, as it offers the best chances of long-term locally grounded sustainability. After a brief introduction setting out salient facts about development (or the absence thereof ) in SSA, the next section offers a knowledge-based framework for development and development cooperation; the subsequent section focuses on GBSN as a case in point, a global knowledge network of business schools with the potential to enhance local capacity to generate tomorrow’s leaders and managers in SSA. Why are Sub-Saharan economies lagging behind? Economic growth of SSA countries has accelerated these past ten years, thanks largely to improved macroeconomic policies and favourable terms of trade. Yet living standards of the vast majority of the population are still lagging far behind that in other regions. Taking a longer-term perspective, with the exception of South Africa and extractive industry clusters, SSA is unique in having experienced massive urbanisation, with some of the world’s fastestgrowing cities, without a corresponding increase in industry. Because of a failure over centuries to raise smallholder agricultural productivity, migration to the cities often is ‘a simple displacement of poverty to the urban environment’