Professor Emmanuel Adegbite emphasises the opportunities for African students at the recent IDP Study World Expos in Nigeria

Professor Emmanuel Adegbite, Professor of Accounting and Corporate Governance from Nottingham University Business School emphasised the welcoming environment for African students at the recent IDP Study World Expos in Accra, Abuja, and Lagos.

He highlighted the unique teaching and research opportunities at the Business School for both undergraduate and postgraduate students. His message was further shared on Inspiration FM in Lagos and during a reception hosted by the UK Deputy High Commissioner, where he engaged with Nottingham University Business School alumni and other UK higher education stakeholders.

In his speech at the reception, he remarked:

I want to thank our alumni for continuing this strategic partnership with us, for recognising the value we co-create through engaging in events such as this. This underscores a bigger point about what internationalisation and international education means for us as a university and also for the partakers of that education. It helps us with a lot of cultural intelligence and cultural exchange of ideas. It also informs how we teach, what we teach, to ensure that they remain relevant to a global body of students, and not just what we consider to be good knowledge from our perspective. So, it helps the knowledge production process but also facilitate the relevance of the knowledge dissemination process. As such it is very important that as alumni, we continue to engage in order to inform what we do, in terms of the opportunities and challenges post-graduation, as this allows us to nurture future alumni/current students, to ensure that they are able to navigate this very competitive career and business life.

In sideline discussions, Emmanuel further reflected on a recent major research work undertaken in Africa by Business School faculty. Motivated by the need for Africa’s ‘fit for purpose’ corporate governance regulation, the Institute of Directors of Ghana appointed a team of researchers with extensive research and knowledge on corporate governance in Africa, including Professors Emmanuel Adegbite and Musa Mangena to the Technical Committee that worked on the development of the National Code of Corporate Governance of Ghana. Through a multi-stakeholder approach, they have developed a national code that embeds good and acceptable business practices in both public and private organisations across the board, including the informal sector. The uniqueness of this national code is that it pays particular attention to the local institutional and cultural peculiarities that speaks to the challenges of Ghana rather than simply an adaptation of foreign corporate governance models.

The key benefit of having a context-appropriate national code is that it is likely to be more acceptable, respected and adopted by stakeholders for efficiency rather than legitimation purposes. This will help improve corporate governance practices and helping sustainable growth of the economy. The national code is designed around five core themes.

Emmanuel led the development of the theme on Humane Engagements. This theme focuses on stakeholder engagement, and corporate citizenship, social accountability and responsibility and emphasises that organisation has responsibilities to a wider multiple stakeholders and is aligned to the African values of shared prosperity. Professor Mangena led the development of the theme on Genuine Disclosures, which is focused on accountability & information integrity, transparency, and openness. The theme relates to organisations’ engagement in effective accountability via the provision of regular, dependable and informative disclosures to its stakeholders to aid their assessment of the organisation’s financial and non-financial capital helping them to make informed decisions.

Following widespread stakeholder consultations and engagement on the draft code, the national code was approved and launched by the minister of industry and commerce (representing the President of Ghana) in December 2022.