Written by Guy Pfeffermann
Wednesday, 07 April 2010 10:53
Recently, Nora Brown and I participated in a World Bank conference:
Investing in People – Scaling-up Education for Health Professionals in Africa
(March 30-31). This provided a good opportunity to bring GBSN to the attention
of African policy-makers and health leaders, aid donors and educationalists.
Participants focused on country cases (Ghana, Kenya and Mali), the state of
research, financing, business models, governance, and the role of investors and
donors. I found the event refreshing, because it was highly interactive and all
participants offered unvarnished views. While the need for leadership and
management training of health professionals in the public and private sectors
has in recent years become a central pillar of health systems strengthening
strategies, there remains an enormous unmet need. GBSN can help meet some of
these training needs and so, contribute to a more effective use of scarce
existing resources. Later this month, GBSN, with support from the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation, is organizing a workshop that will bring together a
dozen African universities/management schools. The workshop is to lay the
foundation for a consortium of African universities focused on health
management education.
Written by Guy Pfeffermann
Tuesday, 30 March 2010 12:41
Well, perhaps not quite. Yet the surge of “penny business initiatives” in Haiti’s camps is an astounding phenomenon. What little money displaced persons have has fueled a supply-response that shows incredible entrepreneurial energy: here someone brings in a small power generator and recharges cell phones; there a pedicure tends to ladies who cannot afford more expensive beauty services. It would be a great idea to bring a few of these entrepreneurs to a business school - they might teach faculty one or two things. The Bottom of the Pyramid is alive:
"The biggest tent city in Port-au-Prince includes a full-service beauty salon.
"It don't matter which condition your life is in, you still have to keep yourself clean and look good," Yolene Samard, the proprietor, says while working on a customer's toenails.
Samard's big square tent is made out of tarps and bedsheets. She and her husband sleep in one half; the other half is the salon. It's clean and bright, with a shelf stacked with beauty supplies and a bench where customers wait.
She has tried to make it look like the salon she used to have, which was destroyed.
Most people in the camp have only whatever money they had in their pockets the day of the January earthquake, so few people can afford what used to be her most profitable service: hair treatments."
Written by Lluis Renart
Monday, 29 March 2010 08:59
This month, the Spanish business magazine ACTUALIDAD
ECONOMICA published a supplement listing the prizes they are
awarding to "The 100 BEST IDEAS - the most brilliant products and
services launched in the last few months."
"This
Initiative at IESE is to create a link or association between Spanish
and African business schools. Its objective is to make a contribution
towards the education of African business faculty. To that effect, they
are already cooperating with Lagos Busines School (Nigeria), Nile
University (Egypt) and Strathmore Business school (Nairobi)".
IESE is also working with the newly
created Angola School of Business and IHE in
Ivory Coast.
This is not so much a prize for "The Africa
Initiative", but
to all of us as a vey wide team, in all the different departments of the
various academic institutions, who are generously contributing to all
this underlying effort towards the creation and development of high
quality busines schools in the African continent.
Written by William Woodthorpe
Monday, 22 March 2010 11:30
Mar 11th
2010 | From The Economist print edition
A new
microinsurance plan involving cellular phones and solar powered weather
stations will combat the unwillingness of farmers with small plots of land to
invest in better seed and fertilizer in Kenya. Kilimo Salama, which in
Kiswahili means “safe farming”, uses a combination of mobile phones and 30
automated solar-powered weather stations to provide crop insurance. It has been
set up by UAP Insurance of Kenya, Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest mobile-network
operator, and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, part of a large
Swiss agribusiness group. Farmers pay an extra 5% to insure a bag of seed,
fertiliser or other things like herbicide against crop failure. MEA Fertilisers
and Syngenta East Africa, two agribusinesses hoping to benefit from higher
sales of their products, match the farmers’ investment to meet the full 10%
cost of the insurance premium.
The clever bit,
however, is the administration as local agents simply register a policy using a
camera-phone to scan a bar code on each bag sold. With no field surveys, no
paperwork and no middlemen, transaction costs are minimal, while the impact of
the scheme has already begun to benefit the farmer population.
Written by Mark P. Rice
Wednesday, 17 March 2010 14:35
A team of senior Babson faculty – all former Deans and Provosts – and
a Babson Visiting Faculty from University of Texas at Austin have
co-edited a book forthcoming from Edward Elgar Publishing entitled The
Development of University-Based Entrepreneurship Ecosystems: Global
Practices. The book explores the evolution of six globally
recognized university-based entrepreneurship ecosystems–Babson College,
The University of Texas at Austin, The University of Southern
California, National University of Singapore, EM Lyon, and Tec de
Monterrey–and discusses the research, teaching, and outreach elements of
the ecosystems and the key success factors in their development.
Ideally, the book will provide a roadmap for other universities seeking
to develop entrepreneurship ecosystems supporting education, research
and economic development in their regions.
The coeditors are: Michael Fetters
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; Patricia Greene
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; Mark Rice
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; John Butler
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.
For more
on entrepreneurship ecosystems watch and listen to Professor Rice:
“The
global crisis is not just a problem with mortgage systems and the regulation of
banks in one country with a domino effect into many others. It also forces
universities and business schools to ask questions about the nature of business
and management education, and the issues of ethics we incorporate.”
–Max Price, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town
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