2024-02-18 22:16:17
Despite the many challenges it faces, entrepreneurship among young people and women continues to move forward. Two sector specialists deplore the indifference of political decision-makers to the challenges of these entrepreneurs and suggest that they could do more if States created favorable conditions aimed at supporting them.
Issa DA SILVA SIKITI
“With diminishing opportunities in the public and private sector over recent decades, African youth have increasingly turned to entrepreneurship to create their own income and employment opportunities and female entrepreneurship is also on the rise,” wrote Zouera Youssoufou and Zakari Momodou, respectively general director and projects director of the Aliko Dangote Foundation (ADF), in a recent report entitled “Foresight Africa 2024”.
However, they regretted, these young people and women will never reach their full potential if appropriate investments are not made in the constituent elements of African economies. “The enabling conditions, which are sorely lacking, include significant deficits in the hard and soft infrastructure that underpins modern economic growth and prosperity.
According to these West African entrepreneurship experts based in Lagos, women continue to be confined to low-profit, labor-intensive production sectors, with limited mobility and access to markets, while access to new technologies is also limited by the enormous shortage of anchor infrastructure, including electricity, transport and communications.
Unexpected outages
Tumi, a young Nigerian entrepreneur, is distraught by the untimely power cuts in Nigeria which are devastating small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) which do not have the means to effectively equip themselves against these macabre power cuts.
“We must invest massively in the field of electricity. I believe the infrastructure is completely deteriorated, causing the power grid to collapse from time to time. Doing business in Nigeria has become synonymous with throwing yourself into the den of the wolf,” she says offended.
Nigeria produces on average only 4,000 megawatts for a population of more than 210 million, while the country needs 30,000 megawatts to meet general demand. With an access rate of 80%, Senegal is the best electrified in West Africa, while nearly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not always have access to electricity.
Zouera Youssoufou and Zakari Momodou emphasize in this report published by the Brookings Institution that affordable electricity is a fundamental element of any economy, and is essential for all productive activities and innovation, and even more so for the climate, health environmental and technological progress.
In addition, to boost the growth of this entrepreneurship, these speakers launch a solemn appeal to African governments to invest in education and roads. “Education increases women’s power of action, delays premature marriage and procreation and constitutes a tool for disease prevention,” they add. As for roads, they are the arteries of the economy that facilitate innovation, specialization and competitiveness across the continent.
QA February 18, 2024
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