SCIENCE & EDUCATION

For anyone seeking proof of the extent of China’s reach into Africa, this year’s graduation ceremony for executive MBA students at the partly state-run China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai would have been a good place to start. Alongside the predominantly Asian faces delightedly collecting their degrees were 30 Ghanaians and 12 Nigerians—the inaugural cohort on CEIBS’s Africa programme. 

The programme, which kicked off in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in early 2009, is one of the first offered by a renowned international school in sub-Saharan Africa. Alongside the executives from both local and international companies were a smattering of governmental types, including a Ghanaian MP and a high court judge. Virtually all had met the programme’s $30,000 cost from their own pockets. 

Although it currently only offers the part-time executive MBA in Ghana, which is taught mainly by Shanghai-based professors and uses rented premises, China’s largest business school has grand ambitions for Africa. It hopes to open a campus in Accra and to launch a full-time MBA. Pedro Nueno, CEIBS's president and the Africa programme’s pioneer, calls Africa “the last big opportunity on the planet” for business schools.

China’s relationship with Africa is burgeoning. What started as the post-colonial, revolutionary solidarity of the cold war era, is now being driven by China’s need for the continent’s bountiful resources. Yet the behaviour of some Chinese elements has led to accusations, occasionally justified, of neo-colonialism, resulting in little economic benefit for ordinary Africans, but high costs, including environmental degradation and human-rights abuses.

CEIBS’s move into Ghana comes at an opportune time. The school chose the west African state, it says, because of its relative stability and decent educational tradition, as well as its proximity to the larger, but far less benign, Nigerian market. But it is little coincidence that Ghana also stands poised to join its neighbours as an oil and gas producer. The discovery of the offshore Jubilee oilfield in 2007 was followed, in July this year, by further discoveries at the Owo field, described as “transformational” by Tullow Oil, a British company working in partnership with Ghana’s government-owned National Petroleum Company. 

However, CEIBS pleads more than mere business interests. “CEIBS has been instrumental in developing the business talent that has helped China develop,” says Kwaku Atuahene-Gima, a Ghanaian-born professor of marketing and innovation and the programme’s executive director. “The Europeans and Americans were the colonisers of Africa, but there was not much development, or improvement in standards of living. China has over the past 30 years transformed a very poor economy into a very vibrant one….We decided to bring our model to Africa to help Africa develop.”

Source: The Economist

Photo: The Economist