RECORD number of Henley Business School Africa graduates will receive their MBA degrees in 2019

A RECORD number of Henley Business School Africa graduates will receive their MBA degrees in the UK on Friday, September 20th 2019.

Some of them can opt to do it all over again at the end of November in Johannesburg, when Henley Africa caps 943 graduates over a joyous three-day festival of success, honouring successful candidates in every phase of school’s ladder of learning from advanced certificates to post graduate diplomas in business management, culminating in the holy grail of the international MBA.

It’s one of the many unique attributes of the Henley MBA – a business school that continues to shatter its own records and redefine itself. This year’s crop of 233 MBA graduates is well over the 180 capped last year, while the 2019 enrolments saw 329 students sign up for the family-friendly international MBA – up from 260 in 2018 – enabling Henley Africa to create an unprecedented five intakes to ensure the consistency and quality of the education it provides.

Henley Business School Africa currently accounts for two thirds of Henley’s global MBA intake and about three quarters of the entire flexible international MBA programme – which is also provided in Finland, Denmark, Germany, Malta, Malaysia and Britain. The growing success of the business school says dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley is down to the passion that the faculty infuses in the students and the relevance of the MBA degree, turning out graduates who are not just business leaders, but corporate activists, literally the people who build the businesses that build Africa.

“Master’s of Business Administration is a total misnomer,” Foster-Pedley says, “what we want to do is rename it as a Master’s in Business Activism or a Master’s in Business Action. It’s engagement, it’s making things happen and many people are drawn to us because of this purpose that we provide in their lives during and after their academic journey.”

Another key reason for Henley’s continued growth is the business school’s triple international accreditation, coupled to the fact that the examinations are marked externally and blindly by international markers to global standards, looking at the entire Henley student body.

“People want to know their qualifications hold up, that they’re not being accepted into a place on the basis of a 30% pass in matric, that their three-year degree is actually equivalent to one year of university anywhere else. At Henley, the exams are marked off shore, the standards are immutable. When you get a Henley MBA it’s a standard that no one can argue about,” says Foster-Pedley.

Foster-Pedley, who will be at the UK graduation along with Henley Africa’s academic director Frempong Acheampong and MBA programme head Tebogo Mekgoe, says Henley students and staff aren’t supermen or superwomen, but ordinary people with extraordinary commitment which drive their development.

“ Our MBA students are 70% black, maybe more, 50% women, maybe more, and in the blind assessment process do as well, on balance, as the British, Germans, Malaysians – they do as well as anywhere in the world, in fact. Which means that what we have here in South Africa is contrary to the ever-enduring mythologies of the colonisation of the mind and how not good one is.

“We have very capable people in South Africa and our examination results prove it every time.”

On Monday September 16, 2019, 92 of them will be flying the South African flag proudly, applauded by their families, other graduates and faculty, when they step up at Henley’s fabled Greenlands campus on the banks of the River Thames to receive their MBA degrees.

• Henley Business School Africa is a triple internationally accredited business
  school; the number 1 business school in the world with the potential for alumni to network
  (Economist 2017); and, the number 1 accredited business school in Africa for executive
  education (FT 2018), as well as the number 1 MBA business school in South Africa as rated
  by corporate SA (PMR 2018, 2019).