Africa's entrepreneurs on the rise
Africa is booming with young entrepreneurs, but they don't always operate like their counterparts in the US.
A businesswoman fuels a car at a makeshift gas station along a street near the Bakara market in Mogadishu, Somalia. 'Africa is a continent of entrepreneurs,” says one business professor. 'You have no choice.'
Ismail Taxta/Reuters/File
The start-up world is getting a lot bigger: Silicon Valley now has serious competition from places like Singapore, Sao Paulo, and Tel Aviv.
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Latitude News covers the links between American communities and the rest of the world, asking if there are parallels between what people are talking about here and what’s happening in other countries.
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Will its rivals soon include Lagos, Cape Town, or any number of fast-growing African cities?
Yes, says Benson Honig, a professor in the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. “There’s a demographic time bomb in the aging Western world,” Honig says. “Where are the young people? Africa.”
RELATED: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.
Africans already have the right business instincts. “Africa is a continent of entrepreneurs,” he says. “You have no choice. If you need a part, you can’t order it from somewhere else. It might take six months or a year to come. So you make it yourself.”
Honig’s remarks came at “Unleashing Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies,” a conference hosted last week at the Hult International Business School in Boston.
He believes such ingenuity can be tapped and shared across the world. “Micro-credit, cell phone banking. These are African innovations that are just starting to make an impact in Canada and the US.”
Honig is part of a movement in the business school world, a movement that sees local, on-the-ground entrepreneurship as the most effective way to help kick-start the economies of developing nations.
He was joined at the Hult conference by professors from business schools in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Pakistan, Nigeria, and more. “We’re all optimists,” says Joanne Lawrence, who teaches corporate responsibility and social innovation at Hult. “We all see Africa rising.”
One reason why Africa is moving up: access to capital.
“Innovation requires capital, but historically people from outside the US have had limited access to funding,” says Mike Grandinetti, managing director at Southboro Capital and entrepreneurship professor at Hult. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, “the venture industry has turned on its head. We now have an extraordinary opportunity for new ventures around the world.”
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