Train-the-Trainer Workshop

The Entrepreneurship Education in Schools Initiative was launched in October 2025 by the Universities South Africa (hereafter USAf). USAf is a non-profit membership organisation representing all 26 public universities in South Africa. Guided by a Board comprising of the Vice-Chancellors of these universities and the USAf Chief Executive Officer, USAf advocates for a robust, inclusive, and sustainable higher education sector that contributes meaningfully to the country’s social, cultural, and economic development. As the collective voice of the university sector, USAf plays a central role in shaping national and international discourse on higher education.

In pursuit of sustainable higher education, USAf implemented the Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) programme, its flagship initiative, aimed at embedding entrepreneurship as a core competency across the post-school education and training system. Beyond addressing unemployment, EDHE positions entrepreneurship as a catalyst for inclusive economic growth and social transformation. Recognising the importance of nurturing entrepreneurial thinking from an early age, USAf is extending its focus through this Entrepreneurship Education in Schools Initiative. This initiative seeks to integrate entrepreneurial competencies (hereafter ECs) into the basic education system by equipping pre-teachers with the requisite knowledge, tools, and pedagogical methodologies to cultivate entrepreneurial mindsets in learners.

The specific objectives of the initiative are to:

• Develop a national framework for integrating ECs into pre-service teacher education programmes at public universities.
• Define and standardise core ECs, including opportunity identification, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, resilience, and others.
• Build capacity among teacher educators through a regional workshop utilising a train-the-trainer approach.
• Support faculties of education in developing institutional action plans for implementing the framework.
• Establish a national network of “entrepreneurship champions” within teacher education institutions to promote sustainability and peer learning.
• Facilitate multi-stakeholder engagement through colloquia and roundtables to ensure broad ownership, contextual relevance, and effective implementation.

In a recent report (dated 27 March 2026), the Project Leader of the initiative, Professor Melodi Botha, coordinated the design and drafting of an EC framework. In this report, it was also identified that 24 of the public universities in South Africa offer a degree for pre-teachers.

It is therefore recommended that the 24 universities indicated above, identify at least two “Champions” in the Faculties of Education that can attend a Train-the-trainer workshop. These champions should be involved in curriculum development for pre-service teachers and should be able to train other colleagues in their faculties to apply the teaching methodologies. The three-day train-the-trainer workshop will be held from 8 to 10 June 2026 and will equip these “champions” with the tools to implement the EC framework within their respective Faculties of Education at their universities. The purpose of this workshop is further to transfer the teaching methodologies necessary to teach each of the ECs and their clusters. The final day of the workshop will be used to practically assist each of the champions with an implementation plan/structure on how and where to implement the EC framework within their current Faculty of Education and teaching structure.