Tsiba – pay as you grow

It’s all very well to change the political system, and reform educational policy in theory. But enabling everyone to really compete in our supposedly free and fair economy means giving real business education to those who can’t afford to buy their skills. TSiBA leaps into the gap in 2005, to provide a sustainable source of learning.

“Once you have a business grounding, it doesn’t matter what you want to do. If you want to become an artist when you leave here, you have that space,” says Gia Polovin one of four executive directors of a new Cape Town college of business administration, TSiBA.

Her approach to what TSiBA graduates will do with their diplomas four years from now may appear romantic at first glance, but it matches the holistic approach to education at the core of TSiBA’s educational policy.

TSiBA is inspired by CIDA (Community and Individual Development Association) and offers the CIDA diploma in Business Administration. The CIDA approach is well known in South Africa now, an example of how pragmatic educators and business can both benefit from partnerships.

A billboard at the entrance to Cape Town’s airport says: “So you have an MBA? Big deal.” Sure, it’s only an advert for Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice. But every episode has the same valid message buried in all the reality TV nonsense: it’s not just what you know, or even who you know. Who you are really matters too.

So the TSiBA education attempts to educate the whole person, by not just teaching hard skills, but also developing initiative, marketing, people management, and vision.

TSiBA got started when Gia met CIDA CEO Dr Taddy Blecher at a conference, three years ago. “I got terribly excited about the CIDA model, and decided I want to get involved and give something back.” She completed her post graduate degree in Enterprise Management and took a job at CIDA, working on Strategic Projects. She gained the practical knowledge she needed to start TSiBA and has spent this year preparing for the first intake, operating on seed capital donated from the Shuttleworth Foundation. Mark Shuttleworth sees TSiBA as “a new kind of institution” with potential to become “a global phenomenon.”

Gia runs TSiBA with three executives – Adri Marais (Msc, MBA), Graham Lashbrooke (Hons in IT), and Executive Director Leigh Meinert (BA).

Gia found the word “tsiba” in her Xhosa/ English dictionary in December 2003. ‘We were looking for a name to register our Section 21 company under and, inspired by John Gilmour’s LEAP School for Science and Maths I wanted to know what the approximation for the word ‘jump’ was,” She says in an e-mail newsletter. “Only later did we realise that ‘TSiBA’ could be an acronym for the Tertiary School in Business Administration and only much later did we learn that it means ‘to know’ in Sotho.”

TSiBA shares premises with LEAP, a school for gifted, financially underprivileged high school students that may later become a feeder school for TSiBA.

The Syllabus

Of course, you do need hard, specific skills to match your commonsense, imagination, drive and so on. TSiBA tries to address this skills gap, in a way that develops the whole student and not divorce knowledge from human skills. In this way, they provide what Gia calls “Scaffolding” for future learning.

TSiBA teach a “fully creative” approach to business in the management component of the course. Management is not just of a business or project but self management. They try to teach students to understand themselves and their career paths.

In an attempt to flatten the playing field for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the TSiBA course, like the CIDA course, is four years long instead of three, and includes bridging courses, and skilling up in vital areas like English. As many lecturers are volunteers from companies, TSiBA couldn’t afford to provide home language education even if they wanted to. “You can’t teach someone about accountancy if they don’t know basic English,” Gia says.

Entrepreneurship is another a key component of TSiBA’s approach. “We try to link Entrepreneurship in everywhere,” Gia says. We do a simulations and play business games to simulate a real world environment.” Encouraging Entrepreneurship will include allowing students to start their own businesses, and bringing what Gia calls “entrepreneurial heroes” – successful businesspeople – in to advise them.

Self confidence is built not only through self knowledge, but also through leadership and community development. Students are involved in campus societies, and they also go back to their communities to teach others what they have learned.

TSiBA and CIDA

So how does TSiBA relate to CIDA, what is the reason for the choice of a different name, and what standards are being met?

Headed by four executive directors and run on a businesslike but non-profit basis, TSiBA is a modified model of its inspiration. Students will graduate with a CIDA diploma in Business Administration, newly accredited by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and the Council for Higher Education (CHE), and provisionally registered by the South African National Department of Education. This CIDA qualification is also benchmarked against University of Cape Town equivalents.

CIDA has been going for five years and is now established as a respected and inspirational example of what education could become in responsible partnership with business sponsors. This year, the first set of 83 students graduated in Johannesburg; 70% them are employed, and CIDA’s employment agency, The Personal Concept, is assisting the remainder to get placed.

While retaining strong ties to CIDA, the TSiBA executive wanted to establish TSiBA separately as a Cape Town institution, with its own identity in the eyes of both the learners and potential sponsors.

TSiBA seek out platinum corporate partners in the way CIDA did before them, asking the corporates to donate money, time or resources. The corporates earn either Silver, Gold or Platinum partnership status, depending how much they contribute annually over a four year period – R625 000 yearly, 5 000 000 yearly, or R10 000 000 yearly.

In return for their contributions, the corporates benefit through tax breaks, access to top interns, scholarships for their employees and their employees’ children, and grassroots access to market their products or brand. British American Tobacco recently signed as a Platinum partner.

TSiBA has also been selected as one of the first “destination institutions” of the Mandela-Rhodes scholarships.

TSiBA need money to support their plans for the first intake of 80 matriculants in 2005. But they also welcome donations of equipment, volunteer lecturers.

Gia says they’ll expand only at the rate they can afford, to avoid some of the teething problems experienced by CIDA, who now are being forced to split their campus to accommodate the rapidly growing numbers of students. “They grew too fast,” she says. Their premises in Waverley Business Park in Mowbray, which they currently share with LEAP, is big enough to allow for expansion. As she walks me through the building, Gia shows me an empty loft “That could become another activity room” and an empty room “We’ll put more computers in there when we get them.”

Thorough testing of students during the selection process ensures students are capable of coping with their studies. This alternative admissions process evaluates ability, not just existing skills. A compulsory foundation year compensates for the shortfalls of South Africa’s ailing new education system, providing essential scaffolding to aid later learning.

Gia explains: “This is all about saying ‘Yes, maybe you didn’t have a maths teacher, but you have the potential, the ability, to learn.”

TSiBA differentiate themselves from CIDA’s model with an innovative new “pay it forward” scheme, whereby students at TSiBA commit to sponsor a student once they graduate and begin earning money.

The teaching of skills is integrated with financial efficiency and practical learning. So the tuck shop in the recreation hall will be used as an entrepreneurial practical project, and students will be encouraged to start up other small businesses on campus. They learn other skills by helping to run the campus – doing administrative work in the offices. More menial tasks like cleaning are also done by the students themselves. Part of “paying forward” also includes teaching skills in their communities.

By encouraging a culture of ownership by the students and responsibility to TSiBA, Gia and her colleagues hope to avoid common campus problems like crime. She says in her experience of CIDA, “Students will do anything to help run the campus, and that’s part of the model” and that although an access card security system is in place, there’s a very low crime rate because there’s just so much goodwill.

Facing Challenges

If it seems too perfect, maybe it isn’t so. TSiBA will face many challenges when it comes to structuring the way it teaches students, and supporting them in their studies.

This goes beyond the obvious issues of funding studies. Many of the problems encountered by CIDA in their first years may be the same ones TSiBA faces once they’re up and running.

CIDA graduate Elihle Nguli, who is now Marketing Manager for the SA Excellence Foundation, sheds some light on what these might be. The most important one being expectations. The word “Campus” in itself conjures up Americanised images of rolling lawns, gracious (or at least big) buildings, and opulence. CIDA’s first building was dingy and small, and even their new Johannesburg premises, donated by Investec, no longer contain them and are far from comparable to those at Wits University..

Students do learn to take pride in this difference though. “When we got there it was the opposite of what we’d expected. But it was fun. The atmosphere of the students then was very united, and we wanted to make something of it,” Elihle says.

Many of Elihle’s fellow students dropped out of the course partly as a result of accommodation problems – students couldn’t afford to stay in town or the suburbs of Johannesburg.

Differing skills levels may also play havoc with the curriculum. Although some of her fellow students were dropping out of college, Elihle says bluntly that some things learned in the bridging year were a “waste of time”.

“The courses that I did at high school meant that many of the things covered in the bridging classes were my major subjects that I did at school.” However, she adds, other “soft” skills she gained, taught in what is now termed the “foundation year”, were very valuable to her.

Soft skills courses are not the only way self confidence is taught – some issues are more about basic self worth. “Women in particular often see themselves as inferior,” Gia says, “So we have to deal with gender issues, which we do partly through the medium of HIV/Aids.” TSiBA also employs a full time counsellor.

Students are also supported in educating their parents as to the value of getting a degree. “Parents say to their children ‘Why don’t you rather go get a job so you can support us.’”

TSiBA will have open days so that the parents can see what their children are involved in. “Once parents know the benefit of getting a degree and a job or being an entrepreneur, it obviously helps,” Gia says.

Apart from all the economic benefits, it also allows young adults who are cut off from opportunity to experience “college”. Looking back, says Elihle “It was the greatest four years of my life. I have learned to be self reliant and learned what I was capable of. I was blessed enough to find that out while I was still young.”

Anyone wishing to donate money, equipment or their skills should contact Gia Polovin 021 4481497.

TSiBA’s Executive

Adri Marais (MSc, MBA) is in charge of the Education division. She’s an experienced educator, having run a private college, and worked in IT training. She’s responsible for handling accreditation, the academic advisory council, educational policies and quality assurance and building a curriculum that integrates all the components of TSiBA’s educational philosophy.

Gia Polovin is head of Business Information Technology. She has a post graduate diploma in Enterprise Management in addition to her experience at CIDA, so she’s also in charge of Marketing and Relationship Management – getting platinum partners, sponsors and strategic partners on board as well as drawing in volunteers from the private and tertiary educational sector. And she handles media relations too.

Graham Lashbrooke has a B.Comm (Hons) in IT and has been professionally involved in entrepreneurial tertiary training and IT since 1981. He’s in charge of operations – finances, the IT systems, business plans and so on. Through Graham’s contacts, Oceana covers the rent for the school’s premises, which TSiBA temporarily shares with a similar project aimed at gifted, financially disadvantaged high school students.

Leigh Meinert is the exective director of TSiBA has a BA in Value and Policy Studies, and has worked for CIDA for two years, focussing on youth development in the non-profit sector. She’s in charge of PR and Student developments, which includes recruiting students and building relationships with “feeder” schools.