Johnathan Paoli
Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, Buti Manamela, praised the recent think thank gathering regarding a perspective, aimed towards the future, specifically centering around the role of universities.
“The world is facing four major transformations- and they are all occurring at once. They are economic, including the dramatic decarbonisation of industry; technological, due to the merging of the digital and physical worlds and embedding of AI; geopolitical, driven by the shift from a unipolar to multipolar environment; and social, as citizens cope with massive changes and sometimes conflicting values,” deputy minister Manamela said.
Manamela was attending the EDHE Lekgotla and Studentpreneurs Indaba 2023, held at the University of the Western Cape on Monday.
In opening remarks to the Indaba, the deputy minister addressed the need to keep up with changes in relation to technology, social medial and the world at large.
Praising the role of universities in not only updating current scholastic frameworks but more importantly facilitating new technologies and opportunities for employment.
This follows on a recent shift away from universities towards a concentration upon TVET colleges, and what some have felt to be a neglect of the potential of new technologies and forms of entrepreneurship emanating from university level knowledge production.
“The heart of the EDHE programme is the task of helping us to find ways of making better use of the knowledge that our universities produce so that we can produce policy and institutional mechanisms that will extricate the economically marginalised sections our society such as young people, women, and rural communities from the trap of poverty, unemployment, and inequality,” Manamela said.
The deputy minister said that these discussion and pooling of intellectual and other forms of knowledge resources remains in line with the facilitation of a conducive platform for the sharing of good practices and emerging initiatives in university entrepreneurship.
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