The Network for Business Sustainability (NBS) has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) at the University of Pretoria (Johannesburg) and the Graduate School of Business (GSB) at the University of Cape Town for the first regional affiliate of NBS in South Africa.
“NBS: South Africa” (NBS: SA) will adapt NBS’s successful model for bridging academia and business. It will serve as an innovative hub of academics and business leaders focused on addressing business sustainability issues within an African context while underscoring NBS core values of purposeful collaboration.
“South Africa is a country with pressing sustainability challenges, including high degrees of inequality and poverty, as well as looming natural resource constraints,” said Claire Thwaits, Managing Director of NBS: SA and Senior Programme Manager in the Transnet Programme in Sustainable Development at the GIBS. “We have experienced a growing demand by business leaders for current and relevant examples of sustainability in action across South African and African companies. With NBS: SA we want to support these leaders and inspire a broader uptake of sustainability innovation.”
NBS: SA will establish a Leadership Council comprised of local business leaders across various sectors who will meet annually to identify their sustainability challenges as an input to research. Their first meeting will take place on July 15 to 16, 2013 at the GIBS campus in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“NBS believes in the power of creating innovative and sustainable models through sourcing local knowledge and sharing it worldwide,” said Tima Bansal, Executive Director of NBS. “I’m very excited about this partnership as it will not only help create new sustainable business models in South Africa, but will offer new global perspectives on business sustainability.”
NBS regional affiliates are groups of researchers and business leaders that convene under the NBS mission of fostering collaboration between research and practice to enable sustainable business. They are managed independently but meet the same standards of rigorous content and good governance for which NBS is known. As NBS expands globally, regional affiliates will fulfill a critical role helping to convene and co-create knowledge in a variety of local languages and contexts.
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