Africa lacks managers

According to the Africa Management Initiative, a group of prominent foundations and non-profit organisations created in 2012 with the aim of creating 1-million qualified and effective managers by 2023 to help drive the continent's economic growth, only 10% to 13% of Africa's formally-employed 111-million people are managers. The lack of trained managers in Africa has been identified as a stumbling block to its growth.

What is alarming, says dean and head of the Graduate School of Business and Leadership at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Prof Theuns Pelser, is that organisations aren't sure how to go about changing this.

"The 2014 EY (Ernst & Young) report on sub-Saharan Africa talent trends found that while both talent management and leadership development were rated as highly important, they were also seen as areas where respondents felt they lacked the capacity to deliver."

There is also a lack of capacity to develop new managers. "Africa has too few good formal business schools to meet the need for management education, and graduate schools of business will only ever address a niche in the market for management development," Pelser says, adding that the UKZN Graduate School of Business and Leadership is ideally placed to contribute to the development of local managers.

Source: Business Day