South Africa should prioritise strengthening educational institutions at all levels as a core element of industrial development.

Manufacturing, construction, maintenance and innovation rely on people who can learn, apply knowledge and improve production. Reliable infrastructure provides the necessary working conditions; effective institutions link these capabilities to investment and commercial opportunities.

China offers a valuable example for understanding these relationships. Its industrial achievements prompt us to consider how countries develop the capacity to deliver complex projects at scale and with increasing quality. For South African engineers and business leaders, the key question is how to build such capacity within our own institutional and financial constraints.

Robin Rivaton and Ben Southwood’s recent article, ‘China’s growth machines’, provides a thought-provoking point of departure. The authors explain how Chinese cities compete to attract and develop industrial clusters by coordinating land, infrastructure, financing, and administrative support. Their examples include Hefei’s support for display manufacturing and electric vehicles, as well as Ningde’s backing for battery production. They emphasise the role of local incentives and the capacity to create a supportive investment environment around a particular industry (Rivaton and Southwood, 2026).

This coordination relies on a deeper foundation: sustained human capability development. Education enables industrialisation and becomes productive when combined with investment, infrastructure, technological learning, and market access. China’s experience shows these elements developed together over decades, making it difficult to attribute success to any single factor.

Education as productive infrastructure

Engineers understand that a structure’s performance depends on the conditions supporting it. The same reasoning applies to industrial development. A modern factory requires a workforce able to interpret instructions, take measurements, recognise defects and adapt to unfamiliar equipment. The capabilities needed for these tasks begin to develop years before a worker enters a technical college or university.

Primary education should be included in industrial policy discussions. Reading comprehension enables the interpretation of specifications, procedures and safety instructions. Numeracy supports measurement, estimation and error identification. These practical skills directly affect production quality, workplace safety and the reliability of engineering information.

The World Bank’s account of education and vocational training in China records the introduction of nine-year compulsory education in 1986, followed by successive efforts to expand access and improve provision. It also describes later attention to disadvantaged regions and the extension of public funding for rural education. These reforms illustrate the duration and institutional effort required to develop a broad educational foundation (World Bank, 2015).

There is an important distinction between educational access and educational capability. The World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report places learning outcomes at the centre of education reform. It emphasises the importance of prepared learners, effective teachers and institutions aligned with learning (World Bank, 2018). For industrial strategy, the implication is direct: enrolment and expenditure should be assessed alongside learners’ understanding and ability to apply it.

South Africa’s PIRLS 2021 highlights report recorded an average Grade 4 reading score of 288, well below the assessment’s centre point of 500. The report also documents considerable differences across provinces and assessment languages (Department of Basic Education, 2023). These findings should concern everyone responsible for the country’s future technical workforce. Weak foundational learning narrows the options available to young people long before employers begin recruiting.

An industrial development programme should include explicit commitments to foundational literacy and numeracy. Education authorities must lead, with ongoing support for teachers and school leaders. Engineering employers can contribute through mathematics programmes, career exposure and partnerships that demonstrate to learners the relevance of classroom knowledge. These efforts require continuity and clear objectives.

Building a continuous route into technical work

The transition from primary education to secondary school brings a new set of requirements. Learners need increasingly strong mathematical and scientific reasoning, as well as the ability to explain their thinking. They also need opportunities to investigate, test assumptions and interpret evidence. These abilities prepare future technicians and engineers to handle problems for which a memorised procedure is insufficient.

China’s educational strengths are evident in international assessments, though comparisons require care. In PISA 2018, students in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang performed exceptionally well in mathematics and science. The OECD explicitly cautioned that these four participating jurisdictions did not represent China as a whole (OECD, 2019). Their results demonstrate achievement within those education systems; they cannot establish uniform national performance or prove a direct causal relationship with industrial growth.

In South Africa, the policy task is to strengthen progression between educational stages. A learner interested in construction materials should be able to understand the routes into laboratory work, technical qualifications, engineering study and research. Career guidance should explain entry requirements, funding options and the types of work associated with each route. Employers should help make those opportunities visible beyond established professional networks.

Technical and vocational institutions require particular attention. Industrial production depends on artisans, equipment operators, laboratory technicians and maintenance specialists. Their competence determines whether machinery remains available, measurements remain reliable and work meets specification. Training institutions need suitable equipment, instructors with up-to-date practical knowledge and reliable access to workplaces where students can gain supervised experience.

The World Bank’s China case study describes industry participation in vocational training structures and arrangements that connect schools with factories (World Bank, 2015). The transferable principle is a close relationship between learning and the demands of real-world work. In South Africa, an employer partnership should specify placement capacity, supervision, assessment and the practical tasks students may perform. Completion should demonstrate competence.

These partnerships also need to support instructors. A lecturer teaching equipment maintenance or materials testing should have opportunities to observe changes in industrial practice. Employers, in turn, should understand the educational requirements for a placement. A student cannot acquire a full range of competencies by being repeatedly assigned to the simplest available task. Both sides need to plan for progression.

Universities as partners in industrial capability

Universities contribute through professional education, research and the development of specialised knowledge. Their industrial value grows when relationships with firms enable useful problems to reach researchers and useful findings to reach practice. This requires people who can translate between commercial constraints and research questions, together with clear arrangements for data, intellectual property and the use of laboratory facilities.

An engineering cluster should identify the research capabilities relevant to its firms. A construction materials cluster might need expertise in cement chemistry, durability, geotechnics, manufacturing processes and environmental performance. The university’s role would include conducting independent research and developing graduates who can critically assess evidence. Firms would contribute practical problems, operating data and opportunities to test whether proposed improvements work under production conditions.

Consider a hypothetical programme to develop a lower-carbon construction material from locally available industrial by-products. Researchers would investigate its chemistry and performance. Manufacturers would assess processing requirements and consistency. Testing laboratories would generate evidence on relevant properties. Engineers would evaluate suitable applications, while clients would determine whether the product met their requirements. Progress would depend on cooperation throughout this process.

Universities must also retain the freedom to pursue questions whose commercial applications are uncertain. Industrial partnerships work best when they complement a strong academic institution with credible standards and capable staff. A narrow focus on immediate contracts could weaken the deeper expertise on which future innovation depends. South Africa should support both applied collaboration and the foundations of independent scientific enquiry.

The broader evidence also supports a broad view of development. In its account of China’s poverty reduction, the World Bank identifies education alongside outward orientation, infrastructure investment and policies supportive of competition. It highlights effective governance and coordination while recognising remaining disparities in educational quality between rural and urban areas (World Bank, 2022). Educational investment and economic opportunity must reinforce each other if the benefits are to spread.

Coordinating the conditions for investment

The municipal coordination described by Rivaton and Southwood raises a practical question for South Africa: who is responsible for the full set of conditions an investor requires? An enterprise may have finance and customers yet still face uncertainty over electricity, water, transport access, or the sequence of approvals. Each unresolved dependency can delay production and consume capital before revenue begins.

South African industrial clusters should have an accountable coordination function with the authority to resolve issues across participating institutions. Its work should begin with a detailed understanding of firms’ requirements and existing local capabilities. The function should maintain a programme that sets out infrastructure dependencies, decisions, funding responsibilities and delivery dates. Escalation procedures should specify who must act when an agreed milestone slips.

This approach would help align public infrastructure with realistic demand. Before expanding an industrial park, decision-makers should identify which firms could use it, what their utility requirements would be, and whether the relevant skills and suppliers are available. Engineering teams should assess the capacity and condition of supporting networks. Financial teams should model operating costs and the consequences of slower occupancy or production.

Maintenance needs equal weight in that assessment. A development programme should explain who will maintain assets, how recurrent costs will be funded, and which competencies are required to keep services operational. These requirements connect directly to technical education and municipal staffing. The decision to build an asset creates an ongoing requirement for people, budgets, information, and competent management.

The choice of cluster should reflect credible regional opportunities. Potential areas for investigation might include mining services, construction materials, renewable-energy components or water technology. Each would require its own assessment of demand, supplier capability and competition. Public support should follow that evidence. A cluster strategy gains credibility when it explains why firms can achieve commercial sustainability in the proposed location.

Quality assurance as an industrial capability

Testing laboratories, metrology services and certification institutions deserve explicit consideration in this planning. Manufacturers need reliable evidence on their products. Engineers need trustworthy information on materials and ground conditions. Buyers need confidence that specified requirements have been met. Access to competent testing helps firms investigate failures, improve consistency and support the introduction of new products.

For a smaller manufacturer, establishing specialised testing internally can be expensive. Appropriate shared facilities may offer a practical way to access equipment and expertise. Their design must address the reliability of results, competent staffing, impartiality and sustainable funding. A facility that cannot maintain its equipment or retain qualified personnel will struggle to provide the confidence an industrial cluster requires.

Testing partnerships can also create valuable learning opportunities. Students can observe how sampling, preparation, measurement and interpretation affect the evidence underpinning engineering decisions. Manufacturers can use recurring results to investigate process variation. Researchers can identify questions arising from practical performance. Confidentiality and clear responsibility for technical decisions are essential to making these relationships workable.

South Africa’s engineering institutions should use their convening capacity to bring these participants together around defined problems. For example, a regional programme addressing concrete durability could connect manufacturers, laboratories, universities, infrastructure owners, and consulting engineers. It should specify the problem, the evidence needed and how findings will inform practice. Its success should be judged through useful outcomes and sustained competence.

Learning from China with financial discipline

China’s achievements warrant serious attention alongside scrutiny of the costs of its industrial policies. Garcia-Macia, Kothari and Tao (2025) estimate that major support instruments have an equivalent fiscal cost of about 4% of GDP annually. Their modelling associates industrial-policy-induced misallocation with aggregate productivity about 1.2% below the counterfactual. These are model-based estimates, not a complete accounting of every benefit and cost, but they demonstrate the need for disciplined evaluation.

South Africa should attach transparent conditions to public support for industrial development. Proposed investments need independent technical and financial appraisal, clear disclosure of public exposure, and credible oversight arrangements. Programmes should set review dates and explain how support will change if demand, costs or expected benefits differ from the original assessment. Public institutions need the ability to correct an unsuccessful intervention.

Performance measures should cover commercial outcomes, service reliability and capability development. Jobs created are relevant, as are the durability of those jobs, improvements in supplier competence and the cost of support. Infrastructure programmes should report whether assets deliver the services users require. Training partnerships should report progression and demonstrated skills. A small set of meaningful measures is easier to govern than a large reporting system with unclear consequences.

Accountability must also extend to employers. Firms seeking access to publicly supported facilities or training partnerships should make practical commitments to supervision, skills transfer and responsible participation. Stronger local institutions require relationships that endure beyond the announcement of an investment. Businesses benefit when they help build the capabilities on which their future workforce and suppliers will depend.

A practical programme for South Africa

A useful starting point would be a regional pilot centred on an existing concentration of firms. The first stage should map commercial demand, infrastructure constraints, educational provision and available testing or research facilities. This would establish what already works and where a specific intervention could improve production or unlock investment. The baseline should be sufficiently detailed to support later evaluation.

The participating institutions should then agree a limited programme with named owners and committed funding. A municipality might address a service constraint, an employer group might provide supervised placements, and a university or technical college might strengthen a relevant course. Testing facilities could assess whether additional capability is commercially justified. Each contribution should clearly relate to the cluster’s development objectives.

The programme must operate across different time horizons. Improving an industrial connection may support production within months. Strengthening technical instruction and employer partnerships may take several years. Better primary education builds capabilities over a generation. These timescales require parallel action and sustained funding and leadership. Near-term delivery should help sustain commitment to the longer-term work.

China’s experience offers South Africa a reason to examine how education, infrastructure and institutions reinforce productive enterprise. Our response should begin with foundational learning and extend to technical competence, research, and the reliable services firms require. Engineers have a direct role in connecting these elements. The industrial capacity we seek will depend on how consistently we build the institutions and human capabilities that underpin it.