Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia get empowered in IS

The ESEFA (Enterprise Systems Education for Africa) programme’s main objective to train lecturers as well as students in Enterprise Systems (ES) has achieved a major milestone.

By developing a curriculum and delivering the training needed for the students to become SAP, ICT and ERP consultants, ESEFA will equip students with ERP skills to cater to the needs of expanding African markets.

A major project milestone was reached last month, as the first ESEFA Train-the-Lecturer workshop, using the ES Fundamentals core modules exclusively developed for the SAP UA African curriculum, was held in the Department of Information Systems in the Faculty of Commerce at UCT.

Twelve lecturers from Strathmore University in Kenya, the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and the University of Zambia, as well as lecturers from the University of Pretoria (UP) and UCT attended the training. The lecturers were shown how to teach the curriculum to their students and empowered to run extracurricular courses around SAP’s ERP solutions. The next ESEFA Train-the-Lecturer courses are planned for November as lecturers from partner universities in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Mauritius, Botswana and Namibia still need training.

More than 70 students have already attended the 5-day training courses on the ESEFA core curriculum called ‘ES Fundamentals with SAP’. This short course was launched at UCT in mid-June and students from varied disciplines including 3rd year students from TSiBA Education (studying towards a Bachelor in Business Administration) have attended. The ES Fundamentals curriculum has also been integrated into a 3rd year course and into the Post Graduate Diploma in Business Analysis and Systems Analysis in the Department of Information Systems at UCT, as well as into a 3rd year course in Industrial and Systems Engineering at UP.

The ES Fundamentals short course will be given on an on-going basis at universities across sub-Saharan Africa and the Department of Information Systems is giving its next ES Fundamentals short course at UCT from the 17th to 21st November 2014. Currently registered students (from any university) will be able to register for this course which is offered free of charge as it is sponsored by the ESEFA project.

“Being a part of the ESEFA initiative is incredibly rewarding – there is such enthusiasm from the academics and the students to participate in this programme – as Nelson Mandela so aptly said “education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world,” says Karin Reissenauer, ESEFA Project Manager in the Department of Information Systems at UCT.