An ambitious project to help young East African entrepreneurs get funding entered a new phase this morning with a select group beginning their training at the Toyota Kenya Academy in Nairobi. The two-day training will see the 60 youths equipped with the skills they need to grow their agribusiness startups and attract both local and international funding.
The 60 are nominees for the Young Innovators in Agribusiness Competition sponsored by USAID Trade and Investment Hub, Syngenta and the Inter Region Economic Network (IREN), which is the implementing agency. “The main goal is to enable East African youth stimulate enterprises that attract potential investors and stakeholders,” Mr James Shikwati of IREN.
Mr Shikwati, the winner of the Walter-Scheel Memorial Prize 2015 and the Jack Shewmaker Leadership Award 2015 for his development work with African youth, said the competition is open to East African youth aged 18-35 years including Ethiopia, Seychelles, Mauritius or Madagascar, whose enterprises are not more than a year old and have a clearly defined business model.
The participants at the training in Nairobi are evenly divided between 60 start-ups and 60 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The top 30 finalists will receive entry to the Agribusiness Innovation and Trade Fair conducted by IREN and its partners, in May 2016 in Kigali, Rwanda.
The top six finalists will receive seed capital amounting to $20,000 (Ksh2 million). He said the project is a unique way of fighting the high level of youth unemployment using agribusiness. The trainers will use ideas generated by the participants themselves as the starting point.
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