The Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Dr Blade Nzimande address on the occasion of the 27th Annual Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) Education Conference
Programme Director
PWC Board Members present;
PWC Chief Executive Officer, Mr TD Shango;
PWC Director Industry Leader, Roshan Ramdhany; PWC Management Committee members present; Vice Chancellors and Management of Universities; TVET Colleges Principals;
Private Sector Schools; Government representatives; Members of the media; Ladies and gentlemen
It gives me great pleasure to join you on this auspicious occasion of the 27th PwC Annual Higher Education conference.
We welcome PwC’s involvement in the national effort to transform education and making it accessible to all irrespective of class, race or gender.
Your conference today takes place under the theme "Working together for a collaborative future".
This is a theme that is also important to us as government because we believe that collaboration between government and the private sector creates better and more effective public and private services and products.
Programme director, as this conference takes place, government remains troubled by continued incidents of gender-based violence that has been engulfing our sector in recent times.
Over this past weekend, we were burying the remains of one of our own - a 23-year-old, University of Fort Hare Law Student, Nosicelo Mtebeni, whose untimely death sent shockwaves through the country.
What is more troubling is the fact that her brutal death was as a result of a person who was meant to love and protect her. And this is the trouble and challenge with gender-based violence - that it is often those close to their victims who are perpetrators. This means we need to do much more to engage society in general, especially boys and men about the necessity to fight this scourge!
It is important that PwC can join hands with us in fighting this scourge.
Responding to the many challenges facing women in our institutions of higher learning, on Friday 27th August, I released a set of instruments that will further strengthen the realization of our sectoral GBV Policy Framework which I had launched in July 2020.
These instruments are:
- The Implementation Procedural Guidelines on GBV, Sexual and Gender Related Misconduct in PSET Institutions;
- The Implementation Protocol on Rape and Sexual Assault Cases in the PSET campuses; and
- The Implementation Protocol on the PSET Code of Ethics.
Ladies and gentlemen
Our department remains resolute to ensure the transformation of the financial sector as this remains formidable challenge and essential to the broad efforts to transform our economy and our society.
The key driving force of our Third National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS III) is improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the skills development system.
This strategy represents an explicit commitment to encouraging the linking of skills development to career paths, career development and promoting sustainable employment and in-work progression.
NSDS III seeks to encourage and actively support the integration of workplace training with theoretical learning, and to facilitate the journey individuals make from school, college or university, or even from periods of unemployment, to sustained employment and in-work progression.
Emphasis is placed on training to enable trainees to enter the formal workforce or create a livelihood for themselves.
The emphasis is particularly on those who do not have relevant technical skills or adequate reading, writing and numeracy skills to enable them to access employment.
There are those who believe the problem lies with the tertiary institutions that are not producing sufficient throughput of the right quality graduates to enter and succeed in certain occupational professions.
Yet others believe that our basic schooling system does not adequately prepare learners for post school education. Not only are these debates lacking in explaining this anomaly, but they also provide inadequate information towards finding a solution to the problem at hand.
It still remains a key priority to not only seek out but to also find means of increasing the pool of eligible students that enter and succeed in particular skills areas. This argument also extends to the Accounting and financial careers.
In the accountancy career, we need to ensure that we step up our strategic intervention to increase access and success, particularly in the number of black Chartered Accountants (CAs) and offer these young black South Africans increased access in the field of commerce.
While there are currently more than 48000 registered CAs in South Africa, few than 9000 of them are African and coloured.
There are seventeen Universities in South Africa offering the B Com (Accounting) who are accredited by SAICA with a few Historically Disadvantaged Institutions (HDI) being offered SAICA accreditation for their accounting programmes.
We must always remember that the lack of accreditation at these historically disadvantaged institutions limited access and advancement of black people in the accountancy profession.
It results in their BComm graduates not being able to become Chartered Accountants and their qualifications not being recognized by prospective employers.
We all know that SAICA accreditation improves the employability of these graduates, increases their numbers, in particular those coming from disadvantaged communities, and enhancing their marketability of their degrees even for those graduates who do not wish to follow the CA route.
Having said that, I am concerned about the issues that SAICA still has to confront in the pipeline of producing CAs, including the pass requirements for the Postgraduate Diploma in Accounting (CTA) as well as obstacles facing particularly black articled trainees in the field.
We have to confront these obstacles in order to ensure that every aspiring and capable accounting student is able to become a professional accountant.
South Africa cannot afford to lose out on an opportunity to ensure that its produced graduates, particularly on scarce skills contributes to the much-needed job in our economy.
Ladies and gentlemen
We all might be aware that funding for the poor and the “missing middle” students in South Africa, regardless of the many strides made my government in funding post school education and training, still remains a challenge.
The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) funding has increased more than fivefold just in 6 years, from R5,9 billion in 2014 to R34,7 billion in 2020.
In the current financial year, NSFAS funding is expected to reach over R43 billion – a further increase of nearly R10 billion in just two years. As a caring government, we have extended our applications for those eligible for funding for their 2021 studies.
NSFAS continues to collaboration with the South African Institute of Charted Accountants (SAICA) Thuthuka Bursary Fund to ensure that the economy has a consistent flow of adequately and suitably qualified accounting professionals who are representative of our country’s demographics.
Currently as government, we are also examining new mechanisms, backed by both public and private sectors, to support students in the so-called “missing middle” income bracket, and post graduate funding.
Cabinet will now be considering revised options for student funding, including on what can be done for the “missing middle” in our country.
On the other hand, in support of the expansion of access to the PSET system, the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), through the National Research Foundation continues to award bursaries to post-graduate, including PhD students.
The DSI also continue to place graduates and students in DSI-funded work preparation programmes in science, engineering, technology and innovation institutions in support of the initiatives towards ensuring the responsiveness of the PSET system.
As government we will continue to welcome the necessary strategic relationships with the private sector to find innovative approaches to poorer and the previously marginalized students have a real chance at succeeding in the accounting career - a career that would otherwise have been beyond their reach.
I therefore would like to call upon the PwC to also join hands with us and our institutions in making bursary funding available for these students.
Whilst government current funding policy priorities the children of the poor and the working class, it is important that the private sector assist by ensuring that there is no deserving child who is left out of the education system of our country.
Ladies and Gentlemen
As both Departments of Higher Education and Training and Science and Innovation we remain committed to work with you on any projects, particularly those projects on human and institutional capacity development which can benefit our students and the economy.
I am also pleased to say that the Ministerial Task Team on the impact and implications of the 4IR on post school education and training. We will be releasing this
In order for transformation to permeate the post school education and training sector, business needs to lend a helping hand to open the corporate world to young graduates.
There are a number of ways to achieve this, including assisting working with my Department of Science and Innovation to raise capital for SARCHi Chairs and to expand mentorship programmes within our institutions that can covert graduates into qualified professionals.
This is particularly important as we continue to develop our next generation of academics and researchers.
Our skills deficit and transformation challenges also require that we think outside the box in terms of how we optimally use our post-school system to produce entrants to the workplace.
As you may know, our government and both my department in particular are working towards the review of the Higher Education, Science and Innovation landscape and to finalize our Decadal Plan to strengthen and grow the STI system with skills development as a central pillar of our job creation and human resource development programmes.
This therefore means that university degrees should therefore not be the only criteria to enter the business sector.
It is essential that corporate South Africa unbolts its gates to graduates from universities of technology, TVET colleges and other training institutions supported by Sectoral Education and Training Authority (SETA) so that we have a range and mix of knowledge and practical skills entering the workplace.
The business sector also needs to be more responsive to our desperate requirement for workplace placements for students in TVET colleges and Universities of Technology.
Our targeted goal for the TVET sector is to work towards producing TVET graduates who are work- ready.
To further promote skills development within the TVET sector, we have also entered into a joint initiative on promoting skills development with the German government.
This partnership seeks to help South Africa to build a modern, high quality and agile skills development system aligned with our needs in the 21st century. Underpinning such skills development will be an apprenticeship based TVET college system similar to the dual system in Germany.
This project will see more of our youth absorbed into workplaces, while getting the requisite technical skills, in a meaningful partnership between the PSET system and industry.
We continue to improve our TVET system to ensure an enabling environment for quality teaching by having a competent teaching workforce which entrenches an enterprising culture among students. The TVET sector is absolutely critical in absorbing especially large sections of youth not in education, employment or training (NEET).
We are glad our universities are now developing TVET College educational and lecture training qualifications. These programmes are accredited by the Council on Higher Education.
Without a functional partnership with business, our goal to increase enrolment and throughput will not produce the desired results.
We encourage you to work with our universities to ensure that the programme is sustained and improves its success rate.
Both my Departments are looking forward to an active working relationship with you to develop critical and scarce skills and transforming our economy.
We also invite engagement and input on how to employ the resources of business and government strategically to promote racial and gender equity.
On our part, we are also intensifying the implementation of the University Capacity Development Programme to improve student success, and the quality of teaching, learning and research and to support curriculum renewal in our universities.
Ladies and gentlemen
This will ensure that we increase our contribution to knowledge production and dissemination, through teaching, learning as well as the curriculum development.
Our White Paper on Post-School Education and Training (PSET) emphasizes a more socially just, responsive and well-coordinated PSET system, which provides diversity to quality education and training opportunities.
Amongst others, our policy focus on increasing research and innovation for the purpose of national development.
Economic development depends both on innovation and technology absorption. We will be aligning our Skills as well as Innovation strategies with the government overall Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Property (ERRP).
The strategic realignment of DSI and DHET further opens huge opportunities in the production of both knowledge and skills and significantly contribute to innovation in our country.
In other words, the integration of DST and DHET under a single Ministry offers the country a unique set of strategic opportunities to realign, reposition and project their joint capabilities in new ways.
This integration under a single Ministry is not simply to ensure greater administrative efficiency or bureaucratic streamlining, but to drive the post-school knowledge and skills development imperatives more decisively, more effectively and with greater transformational impact in society.
Through the Department of Science and Innovation, we have developed the White Paper on Science and Innovation and I would like to assure you and emphasize that digitization remains an important component of our strategies moving forward.
Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, The Internet of Things, and data analytics are all very central in our White Paper.
As a matter of fact, I would like to position our Department of Science and Innovation to play a leading role in data analytics, especially within government, but also interacting with other sectors of South African society.
This is the reason we are also excited about the fact that sections of our higher education institutions are taking forward research and teaching on data analytics as exemplified by the research launch of the school of data engineering and computation by Stellenbosch university.
We invite PwC to partner with us as we go along this journey, more importantly for the PwC is the fact that the auditing industry, will be highly impacted by the interruptions of the 4IR and the COVID- 19 pandemic.
By partnering with our universities, especially the Historically Disadvantaged Institutions we will be better placed to respond to these changes.
Though our Innovation Fund, as espoused in our White Paper on STI, we intend to double our investment into research, development and innovation, from the current, and clearly inadequate, level of 0,8 percent as a percentage of our GDP, to at least 1,5 percent by 2030.
We invite PWC to make a contribution towards the establishment and the growing of this important Fund which is aimed at supporting innovation in our country.
One of our major initiatives that I would like to invite the PwC to collaborate with us is the Imbali Education and Innovation Precinct (IEIP) that is led by Durban University of Technology (DUT).
Some of the activities implemented through this project are: to locate the development of the Precinct within the anchor institution approach, (bringing together two high schools, a TVET college campus, a university campus, and a school for the disabled), positioning the DUT Indumiso Campus as the anchor institution.
As I conclude, I would like to emphasize the fact that in-line with the theme of this conference today, our response must be collaborative, multi-sectoral and inclusive.
This collaboration must extend itself to all of us as various sector, in the public sector, private sector, academia, policy makers and other stakeholders.
As a government and a department, we remain firmly committed to forging a dynamic relationship with all the stakeholders including yourselves.
Thank you
