Nadya Eka Lestari
TechInAfrica — In the field of entrepreneurship, Africa has no shortage of its entrepreneurs. However, in order to see entrepreneurs make a real impact on the continent’s economic growth, building an enabling environment for a startup ecosystem is essential.
According to the World Economic Forum, two-thirds of Africa’s 420 million young people are currently unemployed. This is highlighting an urgent need for new solutions to push employment growth. Simultaneously, Africa’s young population has an entrepreneurial spirit with early-stage entrepreneurial activity 13% higher than the global average. But, due to insufficient support and infrastructure, the region’s startups are 14% more likely to fail than those elsewhere in the world.
Entrepreneurs are utilizing technology and creating innovative solutions across Africa, tackling some of the continent’s most crucial issues, from access to water and energy to health services and banking. This entrepreneurial spirit must be utilized, and the startups created by bright young Africans nurtured and supported.
Mich Atagana, head of communications and public affairs at Google SA, has noted that the growth of entrepreneurship in Africa is crucial to its survival. If the continent is going to develop economically, finding employment for the millions of young people who make up the majority of our population is required.
Over 11 million job seekers are entering the market every year. Empowering entrepreneurs and startups is essential to drive employment growth and allow both economic and social development.
However, many tech startups in Africa are facing failure. The primary challenges are accessing financing, specifically venture funding, that will help them take their business to scale.
Read also: Africa Development Bank and Egyptian Government Push for Innovations in Africa
At the World Economic Forum recently, the Africa Growth Platform is launched to help Africa’s community of startup enterprises grow and compete in international markets. The platform is all about creating an enabling environment: firstly, by securing commitments from governments to implement policy reforms aimed at stimulating and accelerating business growth.
Additionally, it seeks to build a community of investors, that will include private investors, foundations, multilateral institutions, and corporate intrapreneurs. Enabling better coordination and pooling of resources that could facilitate larger subsequent rounds of funding.
And ultimately, the platform will create and sustain a community of startup businesses themselves, promoting collaboration and sharing best practices.
The World Bank has also launched l’Afrique Excelle to address critical gaps in existing acceleration programs for francophone African entrepreneurs. This segment has been mostly underserved since mature entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa are mainly anglophone. L’AfriqueExcelle is an investment-readiness accelerator program designed to support the expansion of 20 startups from francophone Africa, seeking to raise early-stage capital between $250,000 to $5M.
These initiatives hold real promise in creating a much need startup ecosystem in Africa. Both initiatives incorporate public-private partnerships at its core.
An excellent example of this is the Caribbean “Climate-Smart Zone” and Accelerator. The Accelerator has created an unprecedented coalition including 26 countries and over 40 private and public sector partners. This aims to implement climate solutions for resilience, renewable energy, development of sustainable cities, oceans and transportation. This climate-smart zone will not only protect the region but create jobs and a new economy based on climate-smart infrastructure.
Examples of what can happen in a collaboration between government and the private sector are numerous. The partnerships hopefully would enable a supportive environment for startups to achieve their full potential to address challenging problems around the world.
Source: africa.com
