Dr. Taddy Blecher
Brilliant Minds and Happy Hearts: South Africa’s First Free Universities
Summary
In this talk, Dr Taddy Blecher will describe the story of creating South Africa’s first free universities.
On the 4th of August, Anglo American in South Africa gifted their former head office building to the Maharishi Invincibility Institute, turning down several offers to do so. This was the second building donated by Anglo American to the Institute. Dr Blecher explores why.
Dr. Taddy Blecher
Dr. Taddy Blecher is the CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association and the Maharishi Institute, which facilitates university education for unemployed youth from 11 countries in Africa. He also founded the Imvula Educational Empowerment Fund and, with the Rockefeller Foundation, started the Impact Sourcing Academy and Invincible Outsourcing, which provides theoretical and practical training in the business process outsourcing sector to unemployed youth, thereby bringing them into the economy. Dr. Blecher is also the creator of the E3 initiative (Entrepreneurship, Employ ability, Education) for the national Department of Basic Education in South Africa. As a direct result of his work, over nearly 20,000 South Africans have been educated post-secondary school, found employment, and moved out of poverty into a more successful life.
Okay, so the extraordinary thing is that 80% of our staff are our own graduates and our own students. And so, as I was saying earlier, it’s quite hard to do something very revolutionary, and if we hire traditional academics, they can be very stuck up and staid and we need people who can see the potential in our students who prepared to work with them on a Saturday if necessary. Like, who prepared to do whatever it takes to help this individual understand a concept in statistics, or finance, or programming, or anything else. The best people to do that are those young people who’ve come through this process who’ve now become successful. So 80% of the people running the institution and our school as well are our own students and graduates, and they have more passion and put in more effort than anyone. And so, it’s really wonderful and that’s really where most of our staff are coming from.
Okay, in the high school it’s, the high school is the government curriculum. And then at the university level, we… I do see a question about Maharishi International University here. We do partner with them on a business degree. And then we’ve developed our own curriculum, as I say, for 45 South African national qualifications. So all the time we’re writing more curriculum, developing more programmes, getting more accreditations and registrations. But we also do a lot of these industry exams, why? Because that’s where the jobs are. So what do employers want? They want people with work experience. So we give all the students work experience while they’re in the institution. They want people who understand, like, if you take Bryte Insurance, they used to employ just BCom graduates, but BCom graduates never learned anything about insurance in a three or four year business degree. Whereas we do a three year insurance programme on top of a business degree at the same time. So our students are insurance specialists by the time they come out. Bryte basically only employ them now. They don’t employ anybody else because they’re hiring insurance specialists with insurance work experience, ready off the bat, right, when they come out of university. So this has been a formula that really is working very well for us.