Reserve Bank challenge lets pupils take on economy

SA Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago has big shoes, but bright young people from around the country are getting ready to fill them.

That is the goal of the annual Monetary Policy Committee Schools Challenge, which touched down in Port Elizabeth on Saturday.

Dozens of the top pure maths and economics pupils from schools across the Eastern Cape attended the event at the Boardwalk Convention Centre with their teachers, along with officials from the Reserve Bank and the department of basic education, who are co-ordinating the challenge.

Reserve Bank spokesperson Nwabisa Ndzamo said the broad objectives of the challenge were threefold — to improve young people’s grasp of economics, to get them to consider a career in the field, and to help them understand how the Bank fitted into the economy and the wellbeing of South Africans.

“To achieve that, the goal is to get the participants into the shoes of the governor of the Reserve Bank.

“They will talk about where we are in the economy, where we want to go and why — and any adjustment that needs to be made on the interest rate,” Ndzamo said.

“They will deliver a monetary policy statement that presents that decision and explains the reasons for it, just like the real governor has to do every two months.”

Each year, working with provincial subject co-ordinators in each province, all schools which include maths and economics in their curricula are contacted and a database is compiled.

The subject teachers in the schools that decide to participate select a team of four pupils and these teams then gather for the all-important workshops like the one at the Boardwalk, Ndzamo said.

“At these workshops we explain the structure of the 1,000-word monetary policy statement that they are going to need to compile and present, and we give them the data.

“If they want to include more data from other sources that’s fine as long as they reference it.”

Once the statements are completed and submitted they go through a stiff process of adjudication first by a panel of bank economists alone and then by a team including department of basic education officials, she said.

“Then in August the top seven teams will be invited to Pretoria to the SA Reserve Bank itself, where they will present their statements to the three sitting deputy governors.

“Each team has to choose who among them is going to be ‘the governor’, who will actually stand up and do the presentation, and then the whole team must field questions afterwards.

“It's a nerve-racking experience for the youngsters but we calm them down and they are always amazing.”

Nkosakhaya Ntanjana, 17, of Walmer High, said he loved economics and was learning a lot at the workshop.

“I use money every day so it is important to know what is going on inside the money.”

Asive Dwayi, 17, of Despatch Senior Secondary, said she was learning that monetary policy was of huge importance because it affected things like inflation and unemployment.

Tammi Booysen, 17, of Port Alfred High, said she was interested in business and entrepreneurship, and what she was learning at the workshop was directly related to that.

Ndzamo said that at the beginning of September the finalists would be invited back to the Bank to an event hosted by governor Kganyago and basic education minister Angie Motshekga where the winner would be announced.

Each pupil in the winning team will take home R12,000 plus a study bursary which includes tuition, accommodation and a stipend, and the winning school gets R25,000.

The other finalists are also rewarded and the original Monetary Policy Committee Schools Challenge database is used to gauge future bursary applications and prioritise successful applicants.

Several young economists now working at the Reserve Bank had come through the challenge, Ndzamo said.