Africa must move from producing job seekers to job creators

June 24 was an important date for Africa. Togo and Gabon became members of the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 member states, home to 2.5-billion people. It plays to a general trend of African countries grouping together to reinforce pan-African strength and identity, seeing the potential for greater strategic leverage in numbers rather than acting alone. The move from Togo and Gabon also served to further bridge the divide between francophone and anglophone countries on the continent — a split that has pervaded regional relationship-building for decades.

Building these kinds of bridges will be critical for Africa’s future success. There is enormous potential on the continent, but much of it has yet to be realised. Even though Africa has the most promising youthful demographics of anywhere in the world, meaningful opportunities for young people remain scarce. So what other bridges need to be constructed to close the distance between the distress of today and the hope of tomorrow?

Entrepreneurship education as a bridge builder

A reliable means for linking current and future potential is through education. It sets the stage for the development of youth, through measures and interventions designed to shape the Africa we want. Business education, for example, with an emphasis on building entrepreneurs in particular, plays a vital role in delivering the knowledge housed within academic institutions to the businesses that really need it on the ground — a critical cog to catalyse growth across the continent.

African graduates number in the tens of thousands each year, but the economies they are entering into cannot support them. There simply isn’t enough diversified growth. Entrepreneurship will be key to tip the balance and drive meaningful growth in beneficiating industries beyond mining and agriculture. The continent needs to move from producing job seekers to producing job creators and part of the way to achieve this will be for African business schools to work together to build a stronger framework to unlock entrepreneurship across the continent.

In a recent webinar hosted by the Dunning Africa Centre at Henley Business School Africa, Akue Adotevi, a philosophy professor at the University of Lomé in Togo, said, “providing a pathway to unlock entrepreneurship also provides a pathway to employability in Africa. If we can build a bridge between knowledge and business, we will have fulfilled our mandate”.

Referring to the launch of a new partnership between Henley Business School and The University of Lomé, formalised in the Africa-Europe Institute for Innovation & Professions (IAEIM), Prof Adotevi stressed the importance of multidisciplinary and diversified training to deliver a coherent, and adaptable curricula for the changing context of higher education.

A large part of the shift needed is in mindsets — not just skill sets. In Nigeria, entrepreneurship has been embedded in education curricula since 2006, yet there is still no transformation of the army of job seekers into job-creators in that country. There is no lack of desire to become an entrepreneur, but is driven more by necessity than opportunity. Adeyinka Adewale, associate professor of leadership ethics and entrepreneurship at Henley Business School, says it is therefore a problem of quality rather than quantity that Africa is dealing with. Many businesses being created are micro enterprises, developed for sustenance rather than growth. The challenge remains to create entrepreneurial opportunities that encourage growth, opportunities and critically — employment.

Dr Adewale says the opportunities are there if we know where to look. He points out that Africa is in the third wave of its digital revolution and is the only continent in the world that has more female entrepreneurs than male entrepreneurs — which holds significant potential to kick-start broader economic growth as well as to achieve gender equality. But to capitalise on these trends, more young people need to be taught to recognise and act on opportunities.

Many young people are still fearful of becoming entrepreneurs as they perceive it as difficult and the failure rate across the continent is depressingly high. A large part of the work of IAEIM is therefore to equip students with the right attitudes and capabilities so that more can be brought to the point of saying yes to entrepreneurship.

Adewale stresses that unlocking an appetite among the youth to build something is not the end of the story. To ensure that entrepreneurs can build investible businesses for economic impact, they need a wide ecosystem of support — to help with everything from accessing funding to finding mentors. But this is currently lacking in Africa.

It’s not that Africa doesn’t have an innovation ecosystem — it has a well developed one — but too often the players are operating in silos, which means that in reality, African entrepreneurs remain isolated. A focus on building connection within the ecosystem could help to create a powerful community of practice that enables African entrepreneurs to thrive.

A key part of this will be to ensure that learning is embedded back into the development of IAEIM to mould an emerging framework for entrepreneurship that is contextualised for Africa. 

The hope is that these kind of partnerships have the potential to be living conduits for the flow of skills and knowledge between anglophone and francophone Africa and between academia, the economy and governments. Unless we build the connective tissue between these often siloed areas in a practical and purposeful way, we can expect development to continue to be stymied. The stronger the links, the faster we can rise together.

• Choulet is director of development & alumni and vice-dean Africa at Henley Business School. Narula is director of the Dunning Africa Centre at Henley Business School Africa and John H Dunning chair of international business regulation in the UK.