/ 25 March 2011

The green education conundrum

The Green Education Conundrum

The environmental curriculum may be the fastest growing in the world, but South Africa has master’s graduates sitting around unemployed.

The massive mismatch between university training in environmentalism and the skills the sector needs came under scrutiny at a summit in Pretoria earlier this month. The South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) and the Lewis Foundation convened the summit with the government departments of environmental affairs, water affairs and science and technology.

“There is no cohesion between leaders in this particular sector and those coming from supply and demand, so there is a mismatch or no meeting of requirements [of business] at all,” said Mike Tsotetsi, chief executive of the Tourism, Hospitality and Sport Education and Training Authority (Theta), at the summit.

Theta is the main sector education and training authority (Seta) dealing with environmental matters — and delegates at the summit said part of the problem was that the environmental sector does not have its own Seta but has to piggyback on others. Nosipho Ngcaba, director general of the environmental affairs department, said professional environmentalism hardly existed as a sector when the Setas were launched a decade ago and has therefore not had any direct representation since then.

Universities are the only institutions with environmental students in anything near the numbers the sector requires, but lack of agreement in the sector about what an environmentalist is makes it difficult to formulate a standard degree framework. “We don’t know what skills we need in the sector,” said Nwabisa Ntantiso, training and development manager at the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency.

The summit heard that the mismatch evident at university level derives from problems further down the education hierarchy. In schools environmental content is not integrated into the subjects pupils study, said Vivian Malema, manager of environmental education at Johannesburg City Parks. Last year the basic education department held discussions on a new school curriculum. “We tried to get representation [at these discussions],” said Malema, “but we realised this process was [very] closed.”

As a result, “the subjects that could talk to environmental skills do not have an environmental focus”, Malema said. Citing Unesco, Heila Lotz-Sisitka, professor of environmental education and sustainability at Rhodes University, said the environmental curriculum is the fastest growing in the world. But there is also “almost no environmental training” at further education and training (FET) colleges and Setas differ among themselves in their courses and views on training, which means there is no standard qualification, she said.

Workplace realities
Talking about the problems universities have in producing graduates that business wants, Eskom senior environmental officer Troy Govender said some environmental degrees required internships, but these should be more closely aligned with workplace realities. The summit also discussed the limited financing available to school leavers for environmental qualifications. “Bursaries are mainly focused at master’s and doctorate level. There are few at honours and even less at undergraduate [level],” said Glenda Raven, head of the World Wildlife Fund’s environmental leadership development programme.

Ferozah Conrad, Sanbi’s research operations manager, said: “We are missing out by looking at master’s and post-doctorate students; we need to go to undergrad students.” But Caswell Munyai, an environmental science master’s student at the University of Venda who attended the summit, said he had encountered the opposite problem. As an undergraduate he had a grant from the state’s National Student Financial Aid Scheme but struggled to get one for his master’s programme.

“There are a lot of students out there, especially in rural areas, who are ready and willing to study up to the highest level,” Munyai said. “Once we can solve this [funding] issue, then it will provide the country with the necessary skills that are required to keep South Africa up and running like never before.”

Raven and Conrad both favoured creating internships and studentships to boost financing opportunities for students, especially given the huge windfall Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan provided in his budget last month in the form of youth employment bursaries.

Munyai criticised internships for being so short when jobs normally require a minimum of five years’ work experience. They should be extended to at least three years to give interns enough time and the relevant experience needed by employers, he said. But Setas also need to play their part, said Lotz-Sisitka, observing that only 2,4% of learnerships facilitated by Setas are environmental. The imperative is to work with the system, she said: “We need to develop one national training programme with the 23 Setas.”

Verena Meyer, director of the learning academy at the department of water affairs and forestry, said her organisation takes graduates for three to five years. This allows them to get their professional registration and work in an environment that aligns them with the requirements of government and business. “You can’t train for the sake of training; you need to train for the needs of the sector,” Meyer said.