Encourage, Educate, Empower Young Entrepreneurs

By Gor Semelang’o

Kenya: A recent weeklong programme brought together youth leaders from around the world who toured five states including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, the “City of Brotherly Love” and the Liberty Bell, an icon of American Independence, where the US Constitution was promulgated more than 230 years ago.

But perhaps the highlight of this eye-opening tour was the opportunity to present a paper at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. It is at this important forum that the burning issue of youth entrepreneurship was discussed. 

This year alone, right around the globe, some 73 million young people will be unemployed.  Going forward, globally, an estimated 425 million young women and men will join the labour force between 2016 and 2030.

This means the world will need about half-a-billion jobs for young people in the near and reasonably foreseeable future.

These are the young people we should be worried about, and, crucially, they’re also the ones entrepreneurship must help save.

The time for governments around the globe to begin earnestly investing in creating and supporting youth entrepreneurship programmes is now.

As daunting as these exponentially escalating unemployment figures are, they’re only set to climb higher, according to findings by the G20 Youth Entrepreneurs’ Alliance.

The rising fears about spiraling youth unemployment are not only that an entire generation, worldwide, faces the prospects of all the terrors and stresses related to long stretches of joblessness.

It is also the fact that it creates a bigger strain on entire populations of taxpayers paying unemployment benefits, where functioning welfare and social security systems exist, and parents who have to dig into retirement money earlier to support children for longer stretches of time (if that’s even an option). Crucially, it is also that such high levels of unemployment can lead to exploding crime, social unrest and even violence.

The period 2014-2018 will mark exactly a century since the tumultuous conflicts of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The period 2020-2049 will encompass the centennials of both World War II and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Outside of disease pandemics, these vastly violent and disruptive crises brought about history’s first recorded human mega-death events.

Today, there are many more human beings than the barely worldwide total of two billion of a century ago.  The planet now has seven billion souls, to the nearest round figure, the vast majority of them young people with access to digital communications technologies that make them acutely aware of their potential and scale of frustration.

It is no coincidence that the Arab Spring movement and the protests that occurred in Greece from 2010 to 2012 involved countries with markedly high levels of unemployed young people.

To help meet this truly terrible challenge, we should encourage, educate and empower young entrepreneurs – literally worldwide.

More than ever before, the world needs young people to stand up and be counted. Entrepreneurship transforms lives, particularly in this age of widely available digital technologies and networks and the infinite range of innovations that they can open up.  If we want to change the world for the better, we need to create and support more young entrepreneurs — literally everywhere.

I have many fears for the youth of the world in these dark economic times, but I also have every confidence that young men women everywhere have the capacity to develop innovative solutions not only for business purposes but for the greater good of society.  There are many innovations that I can speak of in this regard but let me cite only three:

Urine-powered generator

In the USA: We all know how social media, some of history’s most youth-driven phenomena, are changing the world as we know it. The 29-year-old CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has every reason to be happy.

After Facebook’s strong second quarter earnings report this year, his net worth is up nearly $3.7 billion.

In Asia: Hilbar  Gafur’s anti-harassment shoe earned him a gold medal at this year’s International Exhibition of Young Investors in Malaysia. With his final exam just weeks away, 14-year-old Hilbar  said he is now busier than ever as he refines the prototype of his creation, a pair of women’s shoes modified to ward off attackers. Hilbar said the idea for his creation came after he saw a news report that a girl his age had been subjected to a brutal gang-rape attack in India last July. “Women often become victims of sexual abuse because men consider them weak”, Hilbar said.

Closer to my home: A group of Nigerian teens unveiled a urine-powered generator in Lagos.

In a region where power blackouts and relieving oneself in the open are the order of the day, these girls have found a way to turn urine into electricity.

Their invention provide six hours of electricity with only a litre of urine.

The key to solving many of the world’s accelerating problems lies in understanding the needs of young entrepreneurs in a digital era. They need the space to be creative. They need help creating a business plan around their idea. They are not likely to be proficient in all three of the primary functions of business: production, management and marketing so they need support on how to structure and manage their businesses around these functions.

They want regular and continuing encouragement. They want the freedom to be creative but in a supportive, nurturing environment.

And the future of this planet depends on getting this environment exactly right.

The writer is Chair, Youth Enterprise Fund.