Address by the Minister of Higher Education Science and Innovation, Honourable Prof Blade Nzimande, at the launch of the Higher Education Innovation Fund
Mr Maxwell Gomera, the Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme South Africa;
Mr Gabriel Dava, Deputy Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme South Africa;
Director General of the Department of Science and Innovation, Dr Phil Mjwara;
Distinguished guests;
Ladies and gentlemen:
It is an honour for me to speak at this historic occasion- the launch of the Higher Education Innovation Fund.
While South Africa continues to battle the intractable challenge of youth unemployment in general, Statistics South Africa has picked up a recent trend in deepening unemployment among graduates.
Various reviews were conducted on the state of our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, in our post school education and training system by among others, the National Advisory Council on Innovation, the Technology Innovation Agency and our Department of Higher Education and Training.
Combined, these reviews reveal that the challenges that characterise innovation and entrepreneurship in our post school education sector, include the following:
- Poor coordination across the ecosystem;
- A weak culture of entrepreneurship and innovation;
- A lack of entrepreneurial support and networks at institutions of higher learning;
- Students’ limited exposure to entrepreneurial opportunities, mentoring and coaching;
- A small number of innovation leaders in TVET colleges;
- Inadequate skills, experience, and education;
- Low levels of capacity in TVET colleges;
- Limited innovation through industry partnerships; and
- Challenges with early seed funding and incentives.
These challenges are more acute in TVET colleges and historically disadvantaged universities. Informed by the reviews conducted by NACI, TIA and our Department of Higher Education, together with the United Nations Development Programme, we established the Higher Education Innovation Fund.
The Higher Education Innovation Fund will target students who are aspiring student innovators and tech-entrepreneurs emerging from TVET colleges and universities. This will be done through programmes that support general entrepreneurship, ideation, design thinking.
Through the Higher Education Innovation Fund, we intend to plug the gaps in the existing suite of instruments and programmes available to support innovation and tech-entrepreneurship in the country as a whole.
This will be done through among others, supporting business model development, validation and development of tech-entrepreneurship, support commercialisation, market access and IP protection and supporting scale-up and investor readiness.
At a strategic level and through the Higher Education Innovation Fund, we seek to achieve the following national outcomes-
- A well-coordinated, integrated, and responsive innovation-entrepreneurship ecosystem, to meet the needs of student innovators and tech-entrepreneurship, in pursuit of creating a culture of innovation in higher education;
- A sufficiently funded and resourced innovation-entrepreneurship ecosystem;
- Engaged stakeholders, partners, and role-players to support the ecosystem; and
- Trained and skilled student tech-entrepreneurs capable of developing and commercialising competitive innovative products and able to establish and manage sustainable tech-enterprises.
The process that led to the establishment of the Higher Education Innovation, was set in motion by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between my Department and UNDP in November 2021. The signing of this MoU was intended to pursue cooperation and partnership in several areas.
These areas include-
- Co-development of collaborative projects, including the development of evidence- based strategies, for inclusive development and Innovation for Local Economic Development;
- Collaboration on core programmatic areas, incorporating cross-cutting issues of gender and youth participation in the economy;
- Focusing on effective, efficient, and transformative governance, inclusive, just, and sustainable economic growth;
- Climate resilience and sustainably managed natural resources;
- Collaboration on policy development within the Presidential Employment Stimulus and assisting in the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework;
- Drawing on organisational networks and resources to further strengthen the partnership and collaborative activities;
- Support for the DSI Diplomacy Framework within African countries through technical expertise as well as drawing on the networks and stakeholder relations of UNDP country offices; and
- Support for Research, Development, and Innovation in the fields of ICT, digitisation, and the 4th Industrial Revolution towards improving accessibility for all.
The policy context for the creation of the Higher Education Innovation Fund is provided by our 2019 White Paper on Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI), which acknowledges the challenge of high youth unemployment in our country.
Further to this, our Decadal Plan commits my department to transformation and inclusion of the marginalised, in terms of demographic, institutional and geographical transformation of the National System of Innovation.
This is why innovation for inclusion is a theme that runs across all chapters of our Decadal Plan and overlaps with many of the Policy Intents of the White Paper on STI.
As it relates to the institutional arrangements and management of the Higher Education Innovation Fund, my Department and the UNDP are the lead partners. Our entity TIA recently joined the partnership as a co-funder and potential implementer of some programmes.
We are working on extending the partnership to other organisations who will be co-funders. The DSI-UNDP team is currently hard at work to refine the HEIF strategy, processes, protocols, criteria, etc.
Equally important, in a couple of months, two calls for proposals will be publicised for interested parties with suitable programmes and expertise to apply.
Our vision is to grow the Higher Education Innovation Fund to R1 billion and through this launch, we are also inviting private sector companies and other funding institutions, some of whom are represented here today, to come on board and help us achieve this objective.
In conclusion, we are very excited by the establishment of the Higher Education Innovation Fund and value our partnership with the United Nations Development Programme in this regard.
The Higher Education Innovation Fund is a first for our PSET system and country. But also, this Fund has great potential to become a game changer in terms of the production of student innovators and tech-entrepreneurs and by extension, helping us to address the interconnected challenges of skills development and youth unemployment.
