A professor of international marketing and strategy, has stressed the need for African countries to reorient their economies and businesses by focusing on activities that spur investments in knowledge-intensive products and services.
Professor Nathaniel Boso, said African countries must be thinking of building education powerhouses based on quality and global alignment, focusing on high value services exports, which were targeted at regional educational markets.
He was delivering a professorial lecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi on the topic; “International business: why care about Africa?”
Prof. Boso said while many developed economies were heavy exporters of high valued services, Africa remained a heavy exporter of commodities, with the imports of services growing faster than their exports of these commodities.
He said available statistics indicated that educational services across Africa were severely limited, providing opportunities for strong regional providers to exploit.
Prof. Boso cited Ghana as having a strong positive country of perception, which could be leveraged to brand educational institutions for export.
“In this respect, the Ghana Export Promotion Authority could be mandated to liaise with higher education service providers, to research a long-term market potential for the services.
Subsequently, Ghana and other African countries can begin to produce, warehouse and export higher education professionals to regional markets where such services are most needed in exchange for export earnings,” he suggested.
He said in the United Kingdom for instance the total UK education-related exports were estimated to be £25.50 billion as at 2021, increasing by 72.23 per cent in current prices since 2010.
He said the UK had launched a new International Education Strategy with a target to increase the value of education exports to £35 billion per year.
Prof. Boso recommended that countries in Africa de-stigmatise failure to enhance risk-taking and innovation in African societies.
Again, countries must prioritise research quality in higher education institutions and create autonomous research-intensive universities to lead ground-breaking African context studies.
There was also the need to create a research and innovation fund to finance major impactful research and reverse the tides of Africa’s research brain drain. He said this was crucial in bridging Africa’s research and innovation skills deficiency gap to unlock the continent’s potential to pioneer major innovations.
