From my previous post i expressed a desire to write about entrepreneurship and in my own way contribute to the development of entrepreneurship especially on the African continent. Anytime i talk to my friends and colleagues on entrepreneurship and why they are not starting their own ventures. The general response i get is "i don't know where to start from" or "i don't have the capital to start". The first answer bothers me a lot. Because i don't think it should be an answer that even exist. But sadly it does and access to information or the lack of it seems to be the problem. I bet most tertiary institutions have got a "guidance and counselling" office, is it that these offices are not playing their roles? The business registration process alone is a turn off for the already fragile entrepreneur. I listened with shock on the radio one day when a group of young Ghanaian software entrepreneurs narrated how it took them months to register their business even with that it had to take certain intervention from a third party (politician i bet) to get the business registered. What if there was someone, an institution or a book to guide these young aspiring entrepreneurs. This is where mentorship comes in. The Socrates-Plato example alone is enough evidence of how key mentoring is.
Usually young entrepreneurs have people they aspire to be like, But having access to these people can be extremely difficult. You can still pick on someone's brain without the person necessarily talking to you personally. What if the person has a book, blog or other forms of communicating to young ones who want to be like him/her. Here is where i think a lot of African business leaders have failed. Most of the successful entrepreneurs do not have any material whatsoever on how they succeeded despite the difficult African business terrain. I comb the web a lot to find material written by successful African entrepreneurs to share with friends who are also passionate about entrepreneurship but i usually find nothing. I can read about Sir Richard Branson all i want but i always think "he is European" "business conditions are way better than that of Africa" "at least in Europe it doesn't take forever to get paperwork done' though fundamentally key principles needed to succeed in business cuts across. All i am asking for is someone successful to tell her story from the African perspective.
Though i have not given up on this search, i have in my own small way started gathering African entrepreneurship success stories, I have stopped chasing the "Rock stars" and now look for the next entrepreneur who has conquered the hurdle available in front of them like getting their business registered or employing their first worker to share what they have learned in that moment. May be this way, we can gradually tell that African success story...
