As the world commemorates Global Entrepreneurship Week, the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance (YEA) has called upon G20 governments to recognise and support five key recommendations aimed at encouraging and supporting entrepreneurs.
These recommendations were made at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Summit in Canada in June 2010 where G20 YEA was launched and they were further emphasised at the South Korean Summit on 7 to 9 November 2010. The G20 YEA is a global network of young entrepreneurs and the organisations that support them who convene each year prior to each G20 Leaders Summit to champion the cause of young entrepreneurs to the G20 Member Nations.
G20 YEA is also a platform that allows for extensive country to country benchmarking as well as sharing best practices on entrepreneurship. Innocentia Motau, NYDA non-executive board member representing young people in business, explains that at the South Korean Summit a charter outlining a framework of how G20 YEA will engage the G20 process to include entrepreneurship in its ongoing agenda was signed.
Through the following recommendations G20 YEA believes that we can move towards a world where young entrepreneurs are only limited by their imaginations, contribute towards their countries’ economies and become pillars of their communities:
- Governments supporting alternative mechanisms and institutions that provide young entrepreneurs with capital.
- Governments encouraging greater collaboration and cooperation among public, private and non-profit organisations that offer business support services.
- Governments playing a role in encouraging an entrepreneurship culture by communicating self-employment as a possible career option.
- Governments reducing administrative burdens for recently established youth-owned businesses and enacting tax measures that will encourage their growth.
- Governments encouraging entrepreneurial education in schools, colleges and universities.
“In a country where young people are the largest unemployed population, we would be ignorant to not seriously consider G20 YEA’s recommendations. The NYDA already has programmes and services in place which support aspiring and established entrepreneurs such as business loans, the Mentorship Programme and the Business Consultancy Services Voucher but there is always room for improvement,” says Motau.
Motau explains that it makes sense to support alternative mechanisms and institutions that provide young entrepreneurs with capital because accessing capital is often the toughest obstacle faced by aspiring and established entrepreneurs.
One of the initiatives that the NYDA has introduced to make it easier for micro entrepreneurs who would not ordinarily be able to access capital because of restrictive banking regulations is the Group Methodology Lending Programme.
This lending programme enables young people between 18 to 35 who have a minimum of five and a maximum of eight group members to access collateral free business loans of between R1 000 to R10 000. With this methodology loan repayments have also been generally high because the group members are jointly liable for loans repayments.
“We also cannot underestimate the importance of collaboration and cooperation among public, private and non profit organisations, through our partnership with the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (CIPRO) of South Africa we have been able to enhance accessibility of CIPRO products, particularly registration of businesses for young entrepreneurs that the NYDA serves,” indicates Motau.
The NYDA also hopes to resume entrepreneurship education in schools in the new financial year; it was discontinued because of financial constraints. Through the programme the NYDA was capacitating maths, accounting and business management teachers to infuse entrepreneurship education during lessons. The NYDA was also paying for teachers’ and students’ manuals and workshop and transport costs. 30 803 learners were trained through the programme in the 2009/10 financial year.
“Entrepreneurship should not be a foreign concept or a last resort when everything else fails, we hope that we can work with various stakeholders to create a good foundation and greater support for entrepreneurs,” concludes Motau.
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Refilwe Mphane
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E-mail: rmphane@nyda.gov.za
