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Strategic Direction

The FPD strategic direction focuses on rapidly expanding FPD’s educational offering (both formal qualifications at under- and postgraduate level and professional development courses). This will involve expanding the number of FPD schools, curricular development and instructional design capacity and leveraging FPD Group ICT capacity to enter into strategic partnerships with international e-learning providers and expand FPD’s offering of blended and e-learning courses. In designing curricula FPD will embrace a user-centric design and incorporate ethical decision making in curricular design during this strategic cycle. The massive shortage of healthcare professionals in Africa has been highlighted respectively, by the World Health Organisation and the Academy of Sciences of South Africa’s report on Reconceptualising Health Professional Education. The latter report on the potential role that the private sector could play in alleviating such shortages. FPD is responding to this challenge by entering the undergraduate health professional education market through its Nursing School. FPD will also counter weak local economic growth by exploring opportunities in the sub-Saharan Africa region by actively expanding FPD’s products and services in the region.

Leveraging FPD’s registration as a higher education institution is strategically important as there are substantial opportunities linked to the increasing emphasis government is placing on addressing youth unemployment, as well as middle-class aspirations around formal qualifications as entry to the job market. In response to this opportunity, FPD will expand the number of learnerships offered via the SHIPS Department and focus on registering higher certificate courses that could act as bridging programmes for entry to university for students who did not achieve “matric exemption”

FPD will actively compete for donor-funded projects to support our systems strengthening and innovation-focused activities focusing on grants that allow the piloting of innovative solutions and address neglected public health areas.

Under our Innovation focus, we will explore opportunities to expand the Think Tank model that FPD has developed to support evidence-based strategy development and keeping the organisation focused on innovation through emphasising product leadership in education, leveraging the digital insights of Group Companies (Artificial intelligence, apps, digital systems and e-learning), implementing pilot projects within the NHI domain, responding to innovation grant funding opportunities, securing research grants from the National Institutes of Health and partnering with international universities.

A key component of the FPD strategy over the past year and continuing for the next two years is a focus on investing in the future growth of the company rather than pursuing aggressive profit growth. As such FPD will have to be prudent in striking a balance between investing in new product development and containing costs to ensure that the company remains profitable.