EVALUATING VALUE CHAINS IN TERTIARY EDUCATION: SETTING THE DEVELOPMENTAL AGENDA FOR AFRICA

Abstract

In comparison to the World average (15.25%), a relatively large (17.4%) share of the national budget in SubSaharan Africa is devoted to education. However, upon closer scrutiny of the value chain, it would become evident that education is not really addressing the broader development agenda of Africa. Porter’s generic ‘value chain’ model requires activities of an organization to be separated into discrete components for value chain analysis to be performed, and recent trends in higher education make such segregation possible, since Higher Education Institutions (HEISs) are seemingly under intense pressure to create value and focus their efforts and scarce resources on activities that drive up value for their respective customers and stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of value chains on Tertiary Education (TE) in Zimbabwe through information gathered by conducting in-depth interviews with 12 representative authorities from the 17 registered universities (13 public and 4 private), and a sample of graduates and captains of industry. From a qualitative study using a structured questionnaire, it became evident that while both primary and secondary activities need to be well supported, it is critical that universities develop industry- driven value adding programmes in order to make the degrees awarded more relevant and addressing the broader development agenda. It is therefore proposed that by unbundling the academic process into its discrete components with well developed performance measures, a balance between university output and industry demand can be created and, thus help drive Africa’s developmental agenda. Key Words: Value chains, tertiary education, impact, knowledge creation, development. I