EESA Courses

Students must enroll in both of the 3 credit hour courses below, which are taken in parallel. One is a classroom-based course and the other involves field work where participants will work with the entrepreneurs.. Auditing is not an option for these courses. The EESA program is delivered at the University of the Western Cape campus in South Africa.

Supporting Emerging Enterprises

(3 credits, graduate or undergraduate)
This course introduces students to the South African context, township entrepreneurship, the basics of the consulting process, the SEE consulting model, and creative yet practical approaches to addressing managerial issues in emerging enterprises. It is offered at the University of the Western Cape campus.

Entrepreneurship Field Experience

(3 credits, graduate or undergraduate)
This course provides interaction with township entrepreneurs over six weeks as part of structured consulting engagements.

The consulting engagements start at the same time as the class meetings. Teams of five to six students are assigned to work with two entrepreneurial businesses. Team members must develop a relationship with the entrepreneur, establish trust, learn as much as possible about the entrepreneur and his/her venture, determine priorities, select tasks that can be accomplished within the time of the consulting engagement, perform the necessary research and analysis on possible solutions to these tasks, design detailed solutions and related action plans, and most importantly implement the solutions. There is heavy interaction and mentoring of the teams by the three faculty members involved in the program. A final consulting report summarizes the teams’ assessment of each venture and the set of deliverables produced for the clients. Students must also maintain journals of their experiences. Victor Chaitezvi created a blog as his journal during the 2006 trip, and he still continues to post comments and articles relating to his areas of interest. This demonstrates that students’ experiences in South Africa do not necessarily have to end with the program.