In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, host Professor Ignatius Gous speaks with Dr Teenah Jutton, a Mauritian academic, former parliamentarian, mental health advocate, and social activist. Dr Jutton was recognised by MIPAD as one of the 100 Most Influential People of African Descent under 40. She holds qualifications in management, finance, and financial risk management and began her career in Mauritius’s global financial services sector before joining the Open University of Mauritius as a lecturer. She served as an elected member of parliament, co-founded an NGO focused on youth empowerment, produced a mental health awareness film titled Love Yourself, and is currently one of 50 participants selected from over 8,000 applicants for the UNESCO Youth for Peace Intercultural Leadership Programme. She is a member of OWSD, the Organisation for Women in Science for the Developing World, and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.

In this episode of The Knowledge Hub South Africa, Professor Ignatius Gous — researcher, academic, and host of the series — speaks with Professor Deon Rossouw. Rossouw is one of Africa's foremost authorities on business ethics and corporate governance. He was the founding president of the Business Ethics Network of Africa, served as CEO of the Ethics Institute, and has been a contributing member of the King Committee on corporate governance for South Africa across multiple editions of the King Reports. His academic work spans nearly four decades, with sabbaticals at the University of Minnesota, Cambridge University, and the Globe Ethics Foundation in Geneva, where he led a global survey of business ethics across nine world regions. He has written and co-authored foundational texts in the field, including the widely used textbook Business Ethics: A Southern African Perspective.

Entrepreneurship as a formal academic discipline began in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. South Africa only introduced its first formal qualification in the field in the mid-1990s. That qualification, the National Diploma in Small Business Management, was developed by Prof Cecile Nieuwenhuizen at a Technikon in 1994. At the time, there were no local textbooks, no established curriculum and no template to follow. The gap had to be built from scratch.

In conversation with Prof Ignatius Gous, Nieuwenhuizen explains that she & her colleagues did not start in a library. They went out and interviewed successful South African entrepreneurs. They asked what those entrepreneurs wished they had known earlier. They listened to what was missing. The textbooks and qualifications that followed came directly from that fieldwork.

That bottom-up approach shaped everything. The material was practical before it was theoretical. And it reached students who had never once considered starting their own business