The Oxford & Cambridge Alumni of Southern Africa Trust

The OCBASA Trust is being created to channel funds raised from the activities of the Oxford & Cambridge Business Alumni of Southern Africa towards the advancement of South African education. In addition to funds raised through those activities, the Trust will also raise external funds from corporates and other donors.

The specific aim of the OCBASA is to promote educational excellence and interchange as a means of enhancing South Africa's sustainable international competitiveness. Given the provenance of the Trust, that will naturally involve interaction with the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge but the goals of the Trust are broad in nature and seek to reflect more the ethos of excellence in the ancient universities than be restricted purely to facilitating interaction with those universities.

The OCBASA explicitly avoids creating scholarships for South Africans to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge on the grounds that that field is more than adequately catered for by organisations such as the Rhodes Foundation and The Cambridge Commonwealth scholarships.

The OCBASA is rather more focused on domestic education and inbound interaction with the international community. Specifically with regard to Oxford and Cambridge, therefore, the intention is to facilitate trips and visits to the country by non-

South African students at the two universities so that they can experience some of our corporate excellence and indeed our political stability and take that news back to their own countries. There is an overtly commercial approach to the selection of those individuals. We want the leaders of tomorrow from abroad to have a detailed and positive knowledge of South Africa so that they can be become walking adverts for our country. So, we'll identify undergraduates and post graduates who are likely to go on to glittering corporate careers and pro-actively seek to arrange vacation internships for them with leading South African companies. In addition, we are developing relationships with the business schools at each of the universities to get MBA students to consider doing their projects on South African companies.

If you would like to know more about the OCBASA Trust, please email us on
president@ocbasa.co.za
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