Witsies leading in student entrepreneurship who run small to medium sized businesses were given the opportunity to showcase their businesses through pitching at the 4th Annual National Entrepreneurship Gauteng Intervarsity Regional Rounds hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg coordinated by the Development and Leadership Unit, a Division of Student Affairs.
The programme runs in partnership with the Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) programme which was birthed in late 2016 from within the University Education Branch of the Department of Higher Education and Training. Student led movements such as Fees Must Fall #FMF, Rhodes Must Fall #RMF and OpenStellenbosch #OpenStellenbosch, brought forward issues pertaining to academic exclusion, financial exclusion and as a result brought to question the way in which student agency is cultivated at universities, and in particular, whether students are equipped to take control of their future.
Institutions of higher learning are thus tasked with the responsibility to equip their graduates with defined attributes to ensure their competitive emergence in industry. There is now the commitment by institutions of higher learning to incorporate this discipline in co-curriculum programmes that infuse entrepreneurial theory and praxis. This has sparked conversation that the next generation of students should look into being employers themselves, especially in a country like South Africa with an official unemployment rate that currently sits at 34,5% as of 1 June 2022 according to Statistics South Africa.