Overview of MBAid
MBAid is a way in which we seek to use the energies generated by a business school to create positive better social output.
Over the past 10 years MBAid has connected with close to 300 NPO’s though 1400 Henley students and provided over 72 000 hours of free consulting. That is the equivalent of 8.2 years of high level business time.
We look forward, to a social value driven learning that produces value at the same rate or faster than society and business changes itself. MBAid shapes individuals and social projects capable of operating at the frontiers of a shifting, highly challenging global evolution.
MBAid has recently registered as an independent NPO in South Africa. There are future plans to include other business schools and corporates who are equally as passionate about using their day to day energies to positively impact the people around them and the generations to come.
Something exciting and new from MBAid in 2017…
The Impact Design Thinking Hub is a program designed to facilitate corporate companies to use the energies of their business actives to solve social issues. Not just giving back but offering life changing solutions for real world issues.
“Diversity hates more of the same. It’s a fan of variety. Colourful. Different. Who is in your team? It’s the collaboration between diverse teams that leads to unique, creative, ground-breaking solutions to wicked problems.” – Puleng Makhoalibe
At Henley, MBAid forms part of and runs through the life of the business school from engagement of business leaders with non profit organisations, intern programs to entrepreneurship development, scholarships, internal staff development and collaborations with other like minded organisations. Setting up a new context of purpose and social relevance in education.
Activism is nothing more than one person standing up and deciding to make a difference. When many people decide to stand up together, and to take on an attitude of collaboration for a greater cause, the wellbeing of both individuals and wider society is safeguarded.
So we are looking for a broader relevance for business schools. Business schools need a mind change, this mind change comes better from acting and touching more than it does through thinking. When the mind is given new insights it is forced to make sense of them.
At Henley we believe that individual people and the successful businesses they create are the ultimate engine through which social change can be driven.
We are attempting to turn learning energy for good.
MBAid Video
#NGOAid
In a country such as South Africa with its scandalously high levels of inequality it’s obvious that non-governmental organisations and non-profit organisations would play an important role, but in a country ravaged by the depredations of a decade of state capture, this becomes even more critical to buttress state institutions that should have been providing these services but which have been gutted by the endemic corruption. These NGOs and NPOs though are mostly run by volunteers, well intentioned though under trained. #NGOAid gives them priceless skills allowing them to access international funding, by teaching them the importance of keeping clean and transparent books and the tools to ensure that they never lose sight of their primary mission; to help others – and to recalibrate themselves if they wander off course.
#CorporateActivism
State capture didn’t happen on its own. The corporate graveyard is littered with the corpses of corporates who should have known better – and done more; from Bell Pottinger to KPMG, Bain and McKinsey – and then there’s the out-and-out pillage of Steinhoff’s shareholder value which almost collapsed the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Corruption goes hand in hand with corporate collusion. We dare not point fingers at politicians and public servants if we aren’t prepared to hold the mirror up to ourselves. A better society starts in the boardroom and on the shop floor, speaking truth to the very people that have the power to hire or fire us – which takes a far deeper courage than writing an angry letter to the newspapers or waving a placard.
#InformedDemocracy
South Africa is able to wade through the flotsam and jetsam of a decade of state capture because of the work of a handful of very brave journalists. The bitterest irony is that the greatest threat to press freedom is the economic sustainability of media organisations in an era of the greatest access to information the world has ever known. #InformedDemocracy is an initiative that partners with investigative journalists to provide them with different platforms to showcase their work while offering scholarships to future media leaders to take time out of the newsroom to step into the classroom to find new ways of creating a sustainable business model for what is the lifeblood of a properly functioning democracy – credible information that can be gathered without fear or favour.
#CreativeEconomies
There’s a direct correlation between economic growth and the growth of creative industries, especially in emerging economies. One of the most compelling studies has been done by Clayton M Christensen, one of the doyens of the Harvard Business School and the theorist of disruptive innovation. If you build creatives you build economies, it’s that simple. If you bring creativity to business acumen it’s not just about feeling good but providing a deeper provocation into the current economic hegemony – which in our case was all about of digging into the ground and selling what we dug up, except those days are long gone now. We started Henley ICE, the school of Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship, we created an MBA for musicians and the creative arts and we named a scholarship after one of the greatest of them all, Johnny Clegg.
#NewAfricanHeroes
It was Ghanaian economist George Ayittey who coined the phrase African solutions for African problems. At Henley we start by decolonising education and looking within the country and beyond into the continent for systems of knowledge and icons of leadership who aren’t only either dead white imperialists or mythical Greek philosophers. We look to draw inspiration from our own histories; from those who have gone before, who overcame incredible difficulties to excel and/or to liberate a people – or both. Their memories and their examples; from Sol T Plaatje to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, live on in the biggest MBA scholarship programme on the continent, allowing us to reward and recognise a new generation of heroes, with the only expectation that the recipients will pay it forward by their conduct and their example. Steve Biko’s decolonising the mind was a moral imperative, now as we stand on the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution it has become a business imperative too.
#ProsperityBeforeProfit
Building on the seminal work of both Yuval Noah Harari and Colin Mayer, we have started a new campaign in a country with one of the greatest Gini co-efficients of all to undo the harm wrought by 50 years of Milton Keynes’s injunction to make profits only for shareholders. We do this by getting business leaders to think about their purpose and the purpose of their business and the legacies they and their companies will leave in a world beset by diminishing natural resources and a humanity hell bent on squandering that which they will have. The answer is to work to create prosperity, not profit, to benefit everyone in the supply chain from the shareholders to the employees, the suppliers, the customers – and the communities in which they operate. As we reframe our own role as a business school, we work continuously to instil the mindfulness in our graduates to consider the consequences of their actions whether destroying rain forests or corrupting minds.
#FamilyFriendlyMBA
For far too long, the MBA was synonymous with the Marriage Break-up Academy, we wanted to change the mould at Henley Africa creating a space where people could still earn while they learn and emerge neither strangers to their children nor catastrophically estranged from their spouses. It provides free support and relationship counselling to students and their families; family friendly events are part of the curriculum and the time frame of the MBA has been extended to 30 months. It’s a recognition of the modern reality where if we are to break the shackles of patriarchy and allow all our students to compete equally, they must be able to simultaneously hold down different roles; parent, spouse, business leader and community member – and flourish in each.
#EARTH – Environmental Activism through Research and Training at Henley
Hand in hand with our other innovation #HenleyAIR (African Insight and Research), #Earth marks Henley Africa’s transition from a university school that confers qualifications to a higher education institution that provides relevant research for a country in desperate need of it. #Earth and #AIR are not research projects for the expression of academic freedom, but deep impactful insights providing roadmaps for governments, corporates and institution to navigate their way through some of the most explosive terrain imaginable; from land redistribution to agricultural transformation in a way that is open, transparent, fair and sustainable for everyone involved, underpinned by scientific rigour and free from the potentially catastrophic solutions informed by either dogma or desperate quick fix solutions.
