Mindset is hampering young entrepeneurs in Africa: Bradford

Africa

Mindset is hampering young entrepreneurs to start personal businesses, says Chris Bradford, founder and Dean African leadership Academy with  most young entrepreneurs being worried of constraints rather than focusing on opportunities.

“Entrepreneurship can be done at any level of education, so young people should seek opportunities and start own businesses,” Bradfold added.

Bradford said entrepreneurship is an engine of the economy of the country that can spur growth. Jessica Muganza, Umuzi Project CEO believes that using the need based approach to tackle the issues of mindset would help build a stronger entrepreneurship needed to promote private sector.

“We have to go deep into the root causes of such mindset by creating need based entrepreneurship and see how we nurture young people into starting their own businesses,” she noted.

She added that there are efforts to train and nurture students in schools , a move that would help them strong in facing challenges in business. But Michel Mfashingabo, a student says that access to credit will still be a challenge to most youth as most financial institutions do not trust businesses started by the youth and themselves (youth) cannot have their own startup capital.

“Money is not a major issue in starting businesses, you need to start small with the little you have and you don’t get the thirst of earning much profit in the beginning,” Sina Gerrald proprietor of Urwibutso Enterprise says.

He notes that innovativeness and creativity would help entrepreneurs grow stronger and unique businesses that would quickly bring out returns. In an effort to boost the private sector seen to lead the economy, the government set up a guarantee fund through Business Development Fund (BDF)to support small enterprises to access credit from Financial Institutions.

Nevertheless, with the recent initiatives to train entrepreneurs on business plan and financial management, most banks increased their lending to SME sector which saw the sector taking 17 percent of the country’s lending portfolio.(East African Business Week)