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Wythe woman helps Botswana colleges

By NATE HUBBARD/Staff

Sarah Beamer has long been helping American colleges manage their dollars and cents.
This year, she’s taken on a new challenge: pula and thebe – the currencies of Botswana.
The Wytheville resident has gone on three trips since late March to the southern African country, helping develop plans for the University of Botswana to expand to a second campus.
“I’m a firm believer in teaching people to help themselves…and education is the way to do it,” Beamer said.
Beamer, a 1978 graduate of George Wythe High School, worked as the chief financial officer at Emory & Henry College for more than a decade before leaving the college in 2007.
As she was preparing to go back into the private accounting sector, she received a call from a team that was preparing to make a bid for the Botswana project.
Back in 2000, while still with E&H, Beamer had worked on a project to help develop a higher education campus in Pakistan and she eagerly embraced the opportunity for another international endeavor.
According to a press release, Beamer joined the Botswana team as its “educational economist,” with a goal of helping “to assess the national economic benefits, financial sustainability and resource requirements of a second University of Botswana campus in the country.”
“It can be pretty busy,” she said about her work.
Beamer and her team first traveled to Botswana in late March and made follow-up trips to the country in May and August.
The University of Botswana was formally inaugurated in 1982 with a campus in the capital city of Gaborone, according to the university’s Web site.
Today, the university serves more than 16,000 students, and pending governmental approval, is seeking to expand to a second campus in Maun in the coming years.
“From a big picture perspective, it’s very similar,” Beamer said in comparing the university’s Gaborone campus to a typical U.S. campus.
The town of Maun, though, remains more undeveloped as Beamer said it wasn’t uncommon to have to stop on the road for a herd of goats to pass by.
Beamer, a member of St. Paul United Methodist Church, said her group’s report on the feasibility of the second campus is due by the end of 2008 and the university representatives are tentatively slated to make a presentation to the government on the matter in spring 2009.
Although additional details of the report are being finalized, Beamer said she’s prepared to give the second campus proposal a financial thumbs up as her calculations show that it could be essentially self-sustainable within eight years of operation.
She added that she has high hopes that the government also will look favorably on the plan, which calls for the Maun campus to have an enrollment of around 3,000 students.
“There just seems to be a real eagerness for the population to be educated,” Beamer said.
Despite her job seemingly being all about numbers, Beamer said the more important part of her work is making all the data easily accessible to politicians and other officials who may not be as well versed in math.
“What makes it interesting for me is actually interpreting the information and organizing it in such a way that nonfinancial people can understand it,” she said.
While in Africa, Beamer also had the opportunity to do some additional travel.
Accompanied on the May trip by her husband, Johnny, and their daughter, Elizabeth, a George Wythe sophomore, Beamer and her family got to visit South Africa and Lesotho.
“It’s a pretty continent,” Beamer said.
Nate Hubbard can be reached at 228-6611 or