Blog #10: South Africa: Corporate Social Investment is Key for Education

            South Africa is struggling in the area of education. With challenges such as limited resources and tools, standards in education are falling. Africa’s current suggestion is to get corporate South Africa more involved to help improve the level of education. They say that corporate should start thinking and investing in their future workforce to ensure that South Africa remains competitive. One main issue is that there needs to be more investment into education technology, saying that this will improve education and will make way for more qualified, better prepared future employees. However, they don’t want just the donation of money they want the education technology initiatives to be carefully planned out. They want it to be applied correctly within the school system and also for it to be accompanied by continuous teacher-training initiatives which would embrace new methods of teaching. There are ongoing efforts to incorporate technology into schools, but they are lacking a solution that is specifically designed for educational facilities. The Critical Links Education Appliance is the world’s first purpose-built education server that enables up to 3000 students to be connected on a single server. As a solution, the Education Appliance is a cost-effective solution that enables any classroom to become a computer lab with the special Classmate PCs that have been designed for this project. South Africa finds that getting necessary technology into schools is of the utmost importance and wants corporate to get involved. They believe that corporate and businesses should want to sponsor a classroom because they are not only investing in learners, but also their future employees and the economy as a whole.

            South Africa has the right idea to put out what their plans are in trying to implement this specific technology project. I think that now the decision has somewhat been put into the hands of corporate. South Africa is really trying to encourage corporate of all sizes to be a part of this great technology project through this article. I believe their main focus was on the idea of Human Capital Theory, that education too can be seen as an investment. They make sure to emphasize that by investing in this project, South Africa’s education would improve and that they would be investing in the people that will soon be working for them. This is one of the things that is expressed in the Human Capital Theory, that highly educated people can do more and do it better and so contribute more to national development. For an area that is not doing so well in the education sector and it is a place where they live and work, I see it is an important project that they should want to get involved in. I hope that South Africa gets several responses to this somewhat cry for help to trying to equip the youth with the tools for a better education.   

http://allafrica.com/stories/201203300227.html