Every year, we see many universities in Kenya and other parts of Africa graduating hundreds of graduates and postgraduates’ students especially in business courses which includes MBA.
But as they walk across the stage, taking photographs and celebrating their achievements with their families, a fundamental question always emerges from the market: How will these graduates, who are already equipped with profound knowledge, make an impact on the various sectors in the marketplace?
And what is really coming out is how every year we see how knowledge of the graduands is simply disappearing from the public arena and are locked within university’s libraries where dissertations are being bound, catalogued, and shelved away.
For an economy that desperately needs new engines of growth like Africa, this is really strange, especially in ways graduates’ best work is treated. Time has come that we should start asking ourselves, is academia working closely with private sector or are they working in silos trying to meet its own goals, irrespective of what happens to the public and others?
This is because, as we try to look at the dissertations for example an MBA or MSc thesis it typically involves a year or more focused research into a significant business problem where they try to look into how supply chains break down, how consumer behaviour is shifting, how family businesses fail to survive succession. In the end students gather data most companies would never bother to collect and are pushed by supervisors to defend every claim with evidence.
The result is often a genuinely useful piece of applied research. But this is usually filed away in university libraries across the region. Most of them never read outside the examination room.
For example, research into the impact of M-Pesa on small-scale entrepreneurs in Kenya has demonstrated how the platform has transformed small enterprises by providing fast, accessible, and secure digital financial services.
However, despite the valuable research, the country is yet to develop a large, distributed research function that enables the Kenyan private sector to access and apply research findings across the country. Trying to analyse the situation, part of the problem is structural. Dissertations are normally written to satisfy examiners, not executives.
And are always long, technical, and hedged in academic language that does not travel well into a boardroom.
Picture three professionals: Mary, a marketing manager at an agribusiness; Mark, an IT manager at a bank; and Sheila, a finance manager at a hotel. None of them has the capital or the full skill set to acquire and run a mid-sized company.
Together, they work in their own area of expertise. But if Mary can be able to use some of the research work within academic to understand better the agribusiness where she works for, from its customers to its operational weaknesses, she and her two colleagues could pool resources, potentially with outside investors, to buy that same business from its founder.
On the other hand, Mark brings the systems and technology discipline which the business lacks.
And Sheila brings financial rigour to a firm. Over a ten-year horizon, with professional management replacing founder intuition, their business could become a credible candidate for listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange’s SME market segment.
The incentives here are unusually well aligned.
The existing founder gets liquidity and a legacy. The buying trio gets ownership of a functioning business rather than the higher failure risk of a start-up, plus the considerable upside of an eventual public listing. And the economy gets another mid-sized, professionally run, potentially listed firm, exactly the kind of company Kenya needs if SMEs are to graduate into larger, more resilient enterprises.
However, shelved dissertation captures the smaller half of the story. The larger part that also requires more urgent question is what happens to the knowledge and experience carried inside many business postgraduates themselves once they finish the degree.
While a significant number of these graduates already hold demanding jobs in marketing, finance, operations, or technology on what they do daily, but the knowledge itself and years of learning on how a business actually works, rarely gets redeployed or used within boardrooms is still something new.
This is where the private sector’s growth problem and the graduate’s career problem intersect. And where a specific opportunity is now being left on the table, especially the growth through acquisition of existing small and medium enterprises. And rather than looking at growth through new emerging start-ups, Kenya has no shortage of well-run but capital-starved SMEs whose founders are approaching retirement or simply want to exit and try something else.
At the same time, it has a growing pool of MBA-trained managers with sector experience, professional networks, and often severance capital of their own, who are individually too small to buy a company outright but collectively are not. Therefore, there is need for the academia and private sector to work together and create a properly channeled, which can be used for the redirection of this knowledge.
This can be meaningfully in accelerating the growth of Kenya’s private sector.