I remember an interesting event that happened in 1997 when I visited the University of Zimbabwe inorder to collect MBA application form. On my way going out of the campus I was stopped by security guards at the exit gate. The security guards in green uniform started searching my car and asking me questions such as where i had purchased my spare car battery and whether i had receipts to prove purchase. I tried my best to comply since I had nothing to hide but the whole process delayed my exit from the campus by more than 10 minutes. Every car leaving the campus was facing similar searches leading to a long queue of cars and i thought this was unnecessary! I asked myself whether cars leaving Harvard or Oxford University campuses would face the same treatment?
I became curious of this arrangement and started an unofficial research project on internal controls and risk management. My project included establishing risk management practices at the oldest institute of higher education in the nation. After a few weeks of study, my fears were confirmed….the university had poor risk management practices.
The institute receiving a lot of public funds did not have an internal audit department! For internal controls and risk management, they relied on external audits and of course the security guards who were searching vehicles. On realising this weakness , I wrote a brilliant article highlighting the need to improve risk management at the university-the article was published by a popular daily. The good news is that university immediately took action and set up an internal audit department to beef up risk management practices. I have not made any follow ups but would like to believe that the situation is much better with the internal audit department having oversight of all college funds and resources right from the Bursar Department up to Faculty Offices.
In this article, Iam back again at colleges not looking at risk management issues but an important area of university researches. In Zimbabwe, every university student must produce a research project which must be presented to lecturers during the final year at college. This applies to under graduate and post graduate students as well-there is just no escape, one must be equipped with hands-on research writing and analysis skills.
A number of brilliant researches do come from students and some are worldclass! I remember during my college days where I had a friend called Tineyi. Whilst everyone was busy writing projects to do with Accounting, Tineyi had other ideas. He was designing an accounting system which he presented to the lecturer for marking. Everyone in our class presented hard copies of projects bound in a book form but Tineyi submitted a hard copy of his project plus a disk containing his accounting program which he had designed.
Iam not sure whether our Accounting lecturer knew how the accounting program worked or he just gave the brilliant student a distinction without fully appreciating how the accounting software was designed. Tineyi was simply ahead of his time and iam sure that it is going to take several decades before another accounting student at my former college develops an accounting software as part of final year projects.
Universities letting the nation down
Most research projects are filed in universities storerooms after submission and marking. After hard work by students and marking by lecturers , the project is stored in a dark room and this will be the end of usefulness of the project. Sometimes students interested in knowing how to write projects may retrieve old projects in order to familiarise themselves with project writing guidelines and after a few years these projects are taken to the university inferno for burning.
In this article the intention is clear-lets effectively use knowledge generated by young and brilliant minds from the nation. Instead of storing hard copies in dark storerooms, how about selecting a few brilliant projects and uploading on university websites? More than 30, 000 college students graduate every year in Zimbabwe. How about uploading a few hundreds onto each university website so that the nation can benefit by reading top class researches by our students?
A lot of Zimbabweans are looking for information on various topics such as Health, Law, Agriculture, Engineering, Business and other areas but there is very little information that is accessible. The information that can help the nation is lying somewhere in a dark room or worse-it could have been burnt!
Recommendation
Universities should take advantage of the abundance of researches that are being carried out within campuses. Realistically they cannot upload every research produced by everyone, they can however choose the best, those that got distinction marking and upload them onto their sites for use by the whole nation. The corporate sector provides a lot of support to students who will be doing researches. I have assisted a lot of youngsters carrying out surveys or Corporate Governance, Management Accounting and Financial Analysis. After giving them information they just disappear and i never get to know what became of the surveys or research project.
College students are getting information for research from the local industry; they must come back and present results. They may not be able to physically present the results but universities can upload the researches for download. They can do this for free or even charge a certain amount so that they can cover the cost of administration.
With modern management practices requiring evidence decision making, the need for researches and analysis in Zimbabwe cannot be overemphasized. The nation needs researches and the good thing is that thousands of researches are being produced with some of them world-class. All that is required is for local universities to improve on documentation and then meet the demands of all stakeholders. In the case of the Small to Medium Scale Enterprises, we have to rely on surveys and researches done by institutions such as IMF, World Bank or World Bank. It is disheartening to read stories of a visiting World Bank delegation that will be coming to carry out researches on the business sector in Zimbabwe. They should just complement what we already have and not be constantly visiting the nation to help us with researches and analysis.
Do these visits by international delegations mean that the nation lacks talent? I do not think so, there is an abundance of talent especially within our universities. The only area that needs improvement is the documentation part. With students now submitting soft copies, the documenting and uploading part is now easier than before. Uploading a reviewed research project takes 2 minutes!
The hope is that local colleges will move with time and take advantage of emerging technologies and especially their websites to engage with the community they serve and deliver relevant skills and researches. Student research projects should not be taken to the incinerator before analysing whether there is a demand for it because you could be burning innovative projects such as Tineyi’s accounting software which would have become Zimbabwe’s first local accounting software produced by a university student.
