The East African Standard (Nairobi)
May 30, 2005

John Oyuke
Nairobi

Universities and business schools have been told to collaborate with local industries to develop graduates who are relevant.

Industrialist Manu Chandaria emphasised the importance of such linkages and decried the fact that most of these institutions still relied on archaic facilities to teach business management.

He called for enhancement of business school curricula to ensure sustainable private sector contribution to the reduction of poverty and improving people's lives.

"We must learn to change with the world because if we don't do this, we will find ourselves in the archives soon," Chandaria told a meeting attended by representatives from local universities and business management schools in Nairobi.

The meeting-cum-party was held at a Nairobi hotel to mark the end of a series of training Sessions by International Finance Corporation's Global Business School Network (GBSN) in Kenya to enhance teaching skills at the tertiary level by incorporating the case method of teaching.

The method provides business school students real life examples of businesses operating in a specific political, economic and socio-cultural environment, which has a direct bearing on the business decisions that these enterprises make. The cases developed will focus on small and medium enterprises.

Cases provide teachers and students with an opportunity to have in-class discussions on possible solutions to the challenges faced by the enterprise on which the case is based, given the information contained in the case.

Chandaria called for more linkages between local education and training institutions and industries to build transferable models in management education and training.

The GBSN Project has two core objectives, one of them being to develop a base of Kenyan cases.

This could be used for teaching purposes in Kenyan business schools.