By Gab Dike, Lagos
Africa needs to innovate and be ready to drastically transform the education sector for the continent to be part of what teaching and learning will be for future generations.
This was the consensus of opinions of experts and stakeholders at the celebration of the first anniversary of Harde Business School, Lagos.
The occasion was also to launch the Expert-led Courses introduced by the school.
Harde Business School is dedicated to driving educational transformation in Africa and other emerging markets, with a specific focus on preparing young Africans for the future of work.
The expert-led courses is being facilitated by top professionals across niche contemporary areas like fashion, music, comedy, events planning, dance, community building.
Some of the esteemed facilitators include David Adebayo, Group Head, Products and Partnerships, Sterling Bank Plc, Mosunmola Nicole Akinwande, CEO, IPC Events, Mai Atafo,CEO, ATAFO, Dr. Kaffy Shafau (Kaffydance), Josh Alfred ( Josh2Funny), Ife Durosinmi Etti, CEO Herconomy, and many others.
The expert-led courses will be offered through Harde’s online platform, which provides a seamless and interactive learning experience. Learners will have access to a wide range of resources, including videos, interactive quizzes, and personalised feedback. They will also be able to interact with their peers and instructors through online forums and discussion boards.
Giving the keynote speech at the event, Prof. Kayode Makinde, founding Vice Chancellor, Babcock University.
He spoke passionately about how the innovation required to reimagine the future of learning must be adaptive, interactive and creative in order to create the future one can look forward to.
Commenting on the launch, Chief Executive Officer, Harde Business School, Tayo Osiyemi said that building capacity around high value skills is critical to what Harde Business School stands for.
In his words, “Africa is by all stretch the youngest continent in the world and this is a huge potential to be looked into. When we talk about Africa competitiveness, the core of the discussion is how we are going to develop our human capital to be able to contribute our fair share to growth and innovate in the education sector.
“What Harde has provided is a learning platform with micro courses aimed at addressing specific skills crucial to modern day learning and development, a platform where professionals can go to reskill
themselves in specific areas of interests. “Today is especially important because we are launching our expert-led courses. In the next one to three years, we want to impact a million learners and we believe we can achieve it. In the last one year, we have reached over 20,000 learners.
“We also call on the government to look into opening up regulations and policies to allow more players to set up universities. For us to be competitive as a country, we need to rethink our educational curriculum. it has to be deliberately designed to the skills obtainable today. We are the most populous black nation and if we look at our curriculum, we can make significant progress around it.
“Our mission has always been to make learning accessible to everyone, and we believe that these courses will help us achieve that goal. We are grateful for the support of our learners and partners, and we look forward to continuing to provide high-quality learning solutions.”