Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) lecturers Professor Caren Scheepers and Dr Tracey Toefy have won the award for Best African Business Case at the prestigious European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) 2019 Case Writing Competition. This award was for their case: SweepSouth South Africa: Contextually Intelligent Female Leadership of Entrepreneurial Domestic Services. They were nominated for the award by Ivey Publishing, who are the publishers of the case. SweepSouth is an app-based platform that connects over 9 000 unemployed domestic workers with clients looking for home cleaning services in South Africa. The focus or dilemma in the case is on how to best scale the business.

The EFMD Case Writing Competition, which has been running for over 30 years, has predominantly awarded faculty who have developed learning and development case material that can be used globally. The focus is always on innovative and impactful case material that improves the quality of teaching and elicits robust debates and engagement from students. Deputy GIBS Dean Professor Danie Petzer said, “We are honoured to have our faculty recognised by such a prestigious organisation. We are indeed proud of Professor Scheepers and Dr Toefy for their achievement. Case writing at GIBS has seen significant growth over the last few years, and this award is testament to the quality of cases being produced by the school.”

The case study teaching method was popularised by Harvard University and has been adopted by most accredited MBA programmes globally. These decision-forcing cases, which are centred on a thought-provoking problem or dilemma, challenge students by bringing them as close as possible to real-world business situations. Cases often spark lively discussion in class and provide management lessons that students can put into practice in their professional lives.

“Most of GIBS’ cases are published and distributed through Ivey Publishers and Emerging Market Case Collections as well as other Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus indexed journals with high impact factors. We are on a drive to contribute more cases to these platforms and help tell the African story through our work,” Prof Petzer concluded.