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SPU to pilot ground-breaking Economic Activation Office to promote entrepreneurship across the Northern Cape 

Professor Pierre Joubert and Dr Norah Clarke during the EAO workshop visit at Sol Plaatje University.

After hosting the National Student Entrepreneurship Week last year, Sol Plaatje University (SPU) is set to be one of 10 South African universities to pilot the ground-breaking idea of opening Economic Activation Offices (EAO) at South African universities. 

EAOs at universities is an initiative of the Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) programme, established at the end of 2016 from within the University Education Branch of the Department of Higher Education and Training. SPU’s Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) School’s partnership with EDHE was officially established in 2017. 

In preparation for this project, EDHE Director: Entrepreneurship Dr Norah Clarke and her team recently visited SPU to workshop with the University implementation team under the leadership of Professor Pierre Joubert, the School of EMS’ Head of School.  

“We are excited about the potential of the SPU-EAO to bring about real economic change, not only for the students of SPU, but also for the people of Kimberley and the Northern Cape,” said Dr Clarke. “The idea of the SPU-EAO was born through the EDHE national EDHE EAO initiative, with SPU being one of the selected universities to pilot the initiative. The relationship gained renewed traction and support when EDHE partnered with SPU to host the National Student Entrepreneurship Week last year. The vision of SPU-EAO, of blending theory and practice to create knowledge, improve understanding and challenge thinking in the area of entrepreneurship and enterprise management, complements the default role of EAOs being the central point of contact for all things entrepreneurship in a university. Working together we hope to greatly improve the economic participation of students, using entrepreneurship as a consistent tool for growth.” 

Professor Joubert said the School of EMS is focused on establishing SPU as a modern and engaged institution which can influence socio-economic development and social justice in the province and the region. “SPU’s ambition is to build a resilient infrastructure, promote inclusivity, and foster innovation through entrepreneurship development. While many new challenges were created by the COVID-19 pandemic, there are also many new opportunities that SPU and the SPU-EAO can help unlock.” 

In its Expression of Interest document to launch the SPU-EAO the University indicated that the Northern Cape has an extensive range of social and business entrepreneurship opportunities, but the resources – intellectual, financial, and experience – needed to take advantage of these opportunities are lacking. This is why SPU has chosen to develop an academic focus on entrepreneurship, based in the School of EMS, but as a cross-cutting discipline in the University. 

SPU’s five-year Strategic Plan includes entrepreneurship and innovation as key pillars, and identifies entrepreneurial strategies as a way of building local and national skills and helping to address issues such as poverty, education, health, employment and climate change identified by the United Nations (UN) in their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  

The Northern Cape is the largest province in South Africa by land area, but with the smallest share of the population, making it the most sparsely populated region. It is also among the poorest provinces in the country, with a contribution of only 2% to the national GDP, and around 40% unemployment. This is partly because the province has been over-dependent on highly variable sectors such as mining and transport, which present limited job opportunities to residents. 

An over-reliance on the well-established agricultural sector makes the local economy vulnerable to global forces such as climate change and commodity price fluctuations. “SPU has now chosen to focus its attention on shaping an appropriate response to this economic reality, as part of a broader intention of bringing the intellectual effort of a university, through its research and its teaching, to the project of extending the reach of social justice to the most marginal of the surrounding community,” Prof Joubert said.  

The SPU-EAO will play a critical role in coordinating these initiatives and activities throughout the University’s four academic schools – Economic and Management Sciences (EMS), Education, Humanities, and Natural and Applied Sciences (NAS) – while engaging with external partners to promote and support a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem.   

An advisory board consisting of the following divisions will be established to oversee the activities of the SPU-EAO: 

  1. Research Office
  2. Centre for Entrepreneurship and Rapid Incubation (CfERI)
  3. School of Economic and Management Sciences
  4. Student Entrepreneurship
  5. Institutional Advancement
  6. Centre for Teaching, Learning and Programme Development
  7. Chief Operating Officer

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