M.E.R.C. Blog

My wife and I returned from three weeks in Kenya. That country is really moving forward. Unlike only two years ago, when the city was littered with trash, especially lots of plastic bags, Nairobi’s streets are now remarkably clean. Thanks in large part to Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s “Tree Woman”, who won a Nobel Prize in 2004 for her environmental efforts, trees are being planted throughout the city.

One thing that is striking in Kenya, as in most other low-income countries, is the proliferation of non-profit organizations (known as nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs). Besides local branches of well-known international NGOs such as CARE and OXFAM, a great many local NGOs are active in a multitude of sectors. The “Directory & Profiles NGOs Eastern Africa 2006/07” lists about 4,000 such organizations officially registered in Kenya alone. For example page 21 lists, among others, the Baptist Aids Response Agency – BARA, the Bar Hostesses Empowerment Support Programme, Bright Poor Students & Old Age Programmes.

Most local NGOs are operating on shoestrings. Their staff are very small. Often they depend on a single funding source and are therefore dependent as well as vulnerable. I met with a dozen NGO leaders and asked them whether they were happy with their staff’s management skills. Unanimously, they flagged lack of business and management skills as a serious imediment to their achieving their goals. They mentioned specific skills in need of improvement: how to handle money better; how to gather information needed to monitor activities and evaluate results; how to dissemminate information internally; how to improve fund-raising and diversify funding sources; how better to manage personnel, and so forth.

Many funders include small staff training components in their grants, but the NGO leaders’ experience with courses being offered locally has not been good. According to one, “professors are too theoretical – they just lecture, and the training is useless”.

We discussed how this situation might be improved. Huge amounts of money flow to and through local NGOs . Therefore, more effective management would almost certainly have a big positive impact on development and poverty reduction. The good news is that local Kenyan business schools have improved and diversified their courses a lot in the last few years, thanks in part to partnerships with the Global Business School Network (http://mercnetwork.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=36) , the Association of African Business Schools (www.aabschools.com) and MERC, the Management Education & Research Consortium (www.mercnetwork.org). One or the other of these local management schools could create a management training center for NGOs.

In order to get a Center off the ground it would be best if some local NGOs formed a Partnership for Management Education.

Guy Pfeffermann
CEO, MERC

I believe that MERC has been successful in strengthening business schools of under-served markets because the Global Business School Network avoids pitfalls which have undermined some other such efforts. In particular, the “multi-school” approach to forming mentoring teams and the combination of formal commitments with benevolent individual faculty motivations set the approach apart from others.

Why have some Institutional Partnerships Stalled or not Developed in Full?

1. When money is a goal on either one or both sides. Institutional partnership is built on effort and generosity
2. When the focus is not on program participants
3. When one of the sides falls short of expectations: meeting preparations, following recommendations.
4. Changing partners frequently, or having too many. There is a certain jealousy effect
5. When lacking full support from leadership of the school. This is not a one man task.
6. Lack of ambition on either side
7. Not putting enough time into the relationship. Relationships have to be taken care of. Not keeping the partner well informed on developments. Let the partner rejoice on your successes and feel pain on your failures. Be available. Partnerships have a formal dimension and a hot-line. It is important that this line works. Faculty are busy, make sure to close agendas well in advance
8. Lack of formalization in the relationship
9. No internal selling/ communicating partnership activities
10. Not creating value for both parties, especially at the mentored institution (see tools to develop)
11. Not keeping care of personal relationships. Personal relationships involve time and effort, individuals should be taken care of. For example stranding faculty mentors at a hotel when visiting a partner institution is a sure recipe for delaying the next visit
12. When the ultimate goal of the relationship is not that the mentored institution surpasses the mentoring institutions in quality
13. Not traveling or keeping frequent contacts with the mentored institution
14. Not choosing the right people….

Javier Santomá
IESE Business School

How can three or four people do for Africa what most government aid agencies and NGOs have not succeeded in doing ? Five years ago two or three anarchistic World Bank employees (not an oxymoron, I assure you) brainstormed what could be done about one of the most neglected keys to social and economic progress in Africa and poor countries elsewhere. The answer: create a win-win network.
 
The problem: nearly everyone who is trying to do good things in Africa will tell you that one of their main problems is finding local managers who know how to get things done. More often than not, school and even university graduates have to be trained again, on-the-job, because what they learn is mostly academic and unconnected to local needs. The old quip about Senegalese schools teaching kids about “our ancestors, the Gauls” during the colonial period is still very relevant. For example, all modern management schools nowadays teach interactive participatory courses based on “play acting”. Students put themselves into the shoes of decision-makers faced with real-life actual problems. This is known as the “case method”. It is very powerful, because it forces participants to become probklem-solvers, not people memorizing in order to pass exams.
 
The trouble was, until we arrived on the scene, that there were hardly any local African case materials. Where management schools used cases, these had to do with rich country problems encountered by the likes of Enron, Nestle and so forth, hardly useful to a small furniture manufacturer in Accra.
 
So, we met with some of the world’s leading-edge management schools, and they agreed to form a global network of professors who would team up with their African colleagues. Together, they would help African management schools to produce state-of-the-arts local teaching materials, so that students would be trained to be problem-solvers, not memorize books and lectures to pass exams. Going from total authority over students to interactive discussions was a mental revolution for many African professors. Some refused, but more got fired-up.
 
Three years into pilot programs in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and other african countries, a large number of good, locally-relevant teaching cases now exist. In Kernya alone there are over seventy, which are available to any school wishing to use them.
 
I think that the main reason why the network approach is generating so much enthusiasm, and why so many well-known professors from top schools volunteered to team up with African colleagues is because these professors learn at least as much from doing research in Africa than their African colleagues benefit from becoming connected to a world-class pool of knowledge.