By SAMUEL C. SCOTT
Source: The Harvard Crimson Online

A subsidiary of the world’s richest university made a little gift with big ramifications for a fledgling business school in South Africa.
CIDA City Campus, a college in Johannesburg that claims to be the least expensive college in the world (charging just under $600 in tuition for all four years), announced last month that it has received a software gift valued at $7.5 million from Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP).

The gift gave CIDA the rights to all of HBSP’s online e-learning education software, containing approximately 5,000 courses. Contrary to some media reports, the donated material did not include HBS or University course syllabi.

“These are courses in management and functions of management, soft skills courses, IT—all the Harvard content. We’re integrating all these materials into our CIDA degree,” CIDA co-founder and chief executive Teddy Blecher told South African investment magazine Moneyweb last year.

The new software will bolster a CIDA education that is designed to train disadvantaged young South Africans for the business world.

To achieve this end, CIDA has in the past relied on gifts from benefactors like Harvard. Although its computers are now loaded with contemporary education software that is hosted on servers donated by Dell Computers, its libraries are stocked with slightly dated texts acquired through donations.

The software donation was initiated two years ago by former HBSP eLearning executive Jonathan Levy, who was inspired after meeting with Blecher.

“HBSP’s mission is to improve the practice of management worldwide. I believe Jon saw a good fit between our mission and the opportunity to support CIDA’s mission, and that’s what motivated him to initiate the donation of content,” HBSP Director of Corporate Communications Sarah McConville wrote in an e-mail.

Read a complete article: Harvard Business School Publishing offers Software Gifts to School in Africa

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