Advancing business learning for employability in Ghana: ABLE

The Open University Business School is working with Ghana's leading business schools to ensure their courses prepare students fully for employment and entrepreneurship.

The programme is supported by employer representatives in Ghana. Hence it also provides The Open University Business School staff with an ideal opportunity to learn at first hand about the challenges of African management and business – so they can incorporate this in their own global teaching programmes.

The heart of ABLE Ghana is a series of practical initiatives to introduce specific change into business schools' courses

Modern management education emphasises learning through doing – variously known as active, work-based, experiential and reflective learning. The ABLE Ghana (Advancing Business Learning for Employability in Ghana) is an 18-month project working with top Ghanaian business schools to accelerate the take-up of this type of learning in West African contexts.

The heart of ABLE Ghana is a series of practical initiatives to introduce specific changes into business schools’ courses, resources and assessment, to make them more relevant, applied, and practical in the Ghanaian context. The Open University Business School is making its courses available in electronic form for Ghanaian partners to use and adapt to suit their purposes and context.

The partners in the ABLE consortium are The Open University Business School and the Business Schools of the following institutions:

• the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA)
• the University of Ghana
• the University of Cape Coast
• the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
• Winneba University of Education

ABLE Ghana is one of the Educational Partnerships in Africa funded by the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills through the British Council, for the benefit of both African and UK Higher and Further Education.

As the project has been completed, the following projects and collaborations are emerging, building directly on the relationships and experience of ABLE Ghana:

1. Research collaboration with Dr Bernard Obeng (GIMPA) as a Visiting International Fellow at The Open University Business School, and joint publications with Dr Richard Blundel;
2. ACCUMULATE, a pan-African OER-based initiative currently being developed with ACCOSCA, CUA Ghana and GIMPA.

View the Able Ghana report in PDF format (3MB filesize)