A South African Heritage
By Dr Godwin Khosa
The book provides a synthesis of the model that was used to launch the National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) – a multi-stakeholder collaboration model and the role of enabling instruments like social capital, national heritage, and networking in operationalising partnerships between public and private sector role players – with the aim to drive education improvement.
The book is based on Dr. Khosa’s doctoral titled ‘Modelling Multiple Stakeholder Approach to Education Services Improvement: A Case Study of the National Education Collaboration Trust’, which inspired the development of the book – Collaboration in Development: A South African Heritage.
The multiple stakeholder approach
The thesis aimed to theorise and formalise processes of collaboration used in South Africa, drawing on lessons from the NECT’s collaboration approach.
In the book, Dr Khosa explores collaboration at the core of discussions and the moral of South Africa’s national strategy approaches. The book identifies what South Africans are known for and whether what they are known for is a result of conscious choices of national artefacts that make up the South African identity.
Dr Khosa questions, whether South Africans seek to fit in or pursue reconciliation opportunities anywhere and everywhere in the world, as they have in the past, and look for opportunities to trade in their competitive advantages for conciliation. Would this be the way to go when they sit around negotiation tables with forceful people from the West and those from the East content with their own solutions that work, regardless of market principles?
Dr Khosa argues that collaborations specifically the multiple stakeholder approach (MSA), is a common feature in South African history, both before and during the democratic era. The MSA was used during the apartheid era by non-governmental organisations as a method for driving the development of the non-white populace who suffered inferior public services and political disenfranchisement.
He further highlights that post-1994, the MSA was evident in national policies, macro-development programmes and plans, and organisations. The multiparty peace negotiations, dubbed the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), can be seen as the MSA in practice, bridging the apartheid and the post-apartheid eras.
“South Africa is under capitalising on its rich ways of doing business – collaboration, and this approach should be promoted to the same extent that the Japanese have entrenched and exported their ‘small incremental improvement’ Kaizen approach.”
Collaboration in Development: A South African Heritage offers a tapestry of knowledge resources, deep insights, diverse perspectives, and interesting ideas about the strategies that we deploy as a country and what informs those strategies – and furthermore – some of the strategies that we can deploy around collaboration to drive education reform, healthcare reform and reform across other areas in the public sector ecosystem.
About the author
Dr Godwin Khosa served as CEO of JET Education Services for nearly five years before his appointment as CEO of the National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT). While at JET Education Services he headed the NECT Secretariat pending the establishment of the Trust’s full-time office.
A teacher by profession, Dr. Khosa worked as a policy analyst and senior manager at the Centre for Education Policy Development in the 1990s before joining the Human Sciences Research Council as a research manager and proceeding to JET Education Services. There he served initially as a team leader on an education transformation programme in Limpopo and then as the organisation’s Programme Director before being appointed CEO in 2009.
Dr Khosa was also a member of the Council of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), serving from 2012 to 2021. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Sussex; a diploma and a master’s degree in Public and Development Management from the University of Witwatersrand; a BA (Hons) in Geography from the University of South Africa, and a BA in Education from the University of the North.
- PUBLISHER | African Minds |
- ISBN | 978-1-928502-82-1 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R200.00 |
- Classification | Viewpoint |
