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The key to empowering youth lies within them, but will require a shift in mindsets

Saturday September 13 2014
ENT

Kennedy Ndung’u makes a wrist band using beads at his shop in Nyeri, central Kenya. PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI

Rhetoric aside, not all youth can become entrepreneurs. According to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, in most countries, only 4 per cent of the population are entrepreneurs, 16 per cent imitators and 80 per cent can be employed.

The imperative, then, is to encourage the 4 per cent to create job opportunities for the 80 per cent and inspire the 16 per cent.

Young people aged between 15 and 25 represent almost two-thirds of Africa’s total population.  It is estimated that about 130 million of Africa’s young people (more than 50 per cent of the youth population) are illiterate, and a fifth can’t find work.

The discussion on youth unemployment in Africa has focused largely on what African governments are doing or have failed to do in solving this problem. Rarely do we ask what the youth can do to empower themselves.

Governments have an important role to play. But in reality many of their strategies, while appearing impressive on paper, are poorly executed and are therefore, bound to fail. And there are good reasons for this.

Employment problems are complex and job creation programmes that have been successful in other countries, like skills development training, mentoring, incubation and innovation centres or work-based training programmes are difficult to implement at home.

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Such programmes, even when well articulated as outlined in South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry’s Youth Enterprise Development Strategy 2013-2023 document, require highly skilled bureaucrats with strong private sector competencies.

Yet, planning by most African government agencies tends to be done by a small cadre of ministry officials, development specialists and specific line organisations with few functional attributes and limited exposure that can deliver success.

Instead, well meaning initiatives are reduced to centres of patronage and influence peddling, undermining the very cause they were set out to address.

The unintended consequence of this is that it broadcasts to the youth that hard work, sacrifice and discipline are a waste of time, since one can get rich quickly through poor ethics. This further distorts the incentive regime and exacerbates the problem.

The key to unlocking their entrepreneurial potential lies with the youth. But this will require a critical shift in the mindsets of our young people and the rest of us too. Our young people will have to stop looking at themselves as victims and instead as the solution to the problem.

Let me paint three pictures on the mindset change issue:

Advantage of insufficient information: I have five children. Every so often I ask them what their ambitions are, and what they would like to do when they grow up.

From the oldest to the youngest, I am often intrigued by their level of ambition — two want to be doctors, another wants to be a pilot, another a lawyer and another wants to take over my business and run it better than me.

The commonality in their responses is not just in the scale of their ambition but their lack of fear. Their dreams are not inhibited by too much information about what it will take to be any of those professions.

In a sense, their ambition isn’t blunted by too much data, so they dream big. It is not by accident that as parents we always encourage our children to dream and think big.

Entrepreneurs are by definition big thinkers with a penchant for risk. They see opportunities, then muster their finances and equity to bring the opportunity to life.

Most times, this is done with incomplete information. Sometimes, too much information in the beginning can generate risk aversion and fear which in itself can paralyse potentially innovative business ideas.

Nine years ago, I started my Good African Coffee business on the mountains of Elgon in Eastern Uganda and I failed to establish a base there. I then moved to Kasese and there still struggled to gain traction.

The terrain was difficult, I had limited capital, limited industry knowledge and a small team. All this produced a set of very sobering realities and key learnings for me.

Even in the next phase, where I attempted to place a value added coffee product on the supermarket shelves in the UK (the first, for an African owned coffee brand) it took a dozen trips over two-and-a-half years before we were able to launch in Waitrose.

If I knew then what I know now, might I have made a different set of choices. Who knows? What is more important is that I am running the race. It is clear to me that we must encourage our young people to believe in themselves first before the data.

The data doesn’t make you believe in yourself; you believe in yourself first before the sufficiency of the data.

The value of pursuing your dreams despite an incomplete picture is the testimony of the majority of successful business and political entrepreneurs of our time.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not condoning ignorance. I am simply subordinating the need to have “all the ducks in a row” to big thinking.

If Thomas Edison knew that it would take him 10,000 times before his light bulb would finally work, he probably would have made different choices and so would the man who risked most of his family’s venture capital ($75 million currently) on the project — a Mr J P Morgan.

Ninety five per cent of new businesses fail within the first year of their operation. Why? Because the entrepreneurs just give up. It is too tough, too difficult, too many risks, and they presume that there must be a better way, and they could be right.

Of all the quotes on courage, my favourite one is by American author Mary Ann Radmacher: “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that say I will try again tomorrow.” 

And to paraphrase a famous Chinese proverb, the opposite of the courageous one is the coward, jumping up and down saying it cannot be done all the while interrupting the one doing it.

Starting and sustaining a business is tough and entrepreneurs spend a lot of time practising what psychologists refer to as “impression management,” which in common English is essentially “fake it until you make it!”

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic and the Virgin brand loves using that statement. And he knows why. He started and failed in over 13 businesses but today we know him for the several hugely successful ones that have endured. It’s not always how you start but how you finish.

Our youth need to appreciate that sometimes, the most courageous act is the ability to embrace failure. It takes courage to start something, fail at it, start again, fail at it and start again.

Yet, today our society is full of phonies and false prophets who create the impression that success is a smooth path, effortless and without pain and sacrifice.

This is fake guidance and merely puts pressure on our young people to acquire success by any means necessary — including theft and dishonesty —as opposed to hard work, discipline and the lessons that come from trials.

This is not how we raise our children and shouldn’t be how we mentor our youth. This might be a good time to share a story I like. It is about someone many of us think we know but whose background we might not.

In 1955, a Syrian man called Abdulfattah Jandali and a Swiss woman had a baby boy. But because the woman’s parents strongly objected to the union of the couple, they gave up their son for adoption and he was taken up by an Armenian-American couple who raised him.

Despite a difficult childhood and dropping out of school, the young man started a company in his garage with his neighbour and it became successful.

However, several years later he was thrown out of the company he had founded. This created huge psychological pain and for a long time he suffered depression and self-doubt.

Nevertheless, he started another company that became successful. Eventually, he was asked to return to his original company as it was in a financial mess and nearing bankruptcy.

Ironically, they now felt that he was the only one who could engineer the turnaround. He successfully turned it around and today it is one of the worlds most innovative computer and smart phone company.

That company is called Apple. The son who was given up for adoption, dropped out of school, is the late SteveJobs, the global icon of computer technology design, mobile phone innovation and a disruptive business model.

Unlocking your design: In painting this last picture, I have no choice but to smuggle in my world view.

I believe we all have been created with specific gifts and talents and for a purpose. We are not an accident as our extraordinary and complex design attests.

Saying that we are here by accident, is as preposterous as coming across a dictionary and assuming that it is a result of an explosion in a printing press!

One of our most important inquiries is the determination of what our design is our gifts and talents; which ones we do well and bring fulfilment and which ones we don’t and just cause pain.

This inquiry helps us establish our calling and matches our talents with our vocation. In a way, it is a process that establishes our personal balance sheet — what character attributes are assets and what are liabilities. This enables us to flourish in our area of gifting.

Now design is critical to understanding our potential. But equally important is the work we must do. To paraphrase leadership guru Leonard Sweet, entrepreneurs are neither born nor made. They are summoned.

They are called into existence by opportunities and those who rise to the occasion are entrepreneurs. It is not who great entrepreneurs are but what they do that counts. Talent without works is dead!

Encouraging our African entrepreneurs to start businesses even when they face incomplete information, inadequate resources and the need to be courageous to survive in the marketplace, isn’t just a catalyst for job creation but also a spur to innovation and the development of African brands.

Brands bring dignity and self esteem to the process and community. This is critical for innovation and the development of a knowledge based society.

If you have never produced anything, you won’t have the confidence to believe that you can produce something. Harnessing local entrepreneurial capabilities ultimately creates jobs, wealth and leads to a proud, confident and flourishing economy.

Andrew Rugasira is the founder and chairman of Good African Coffee.

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