SMEs are responsible for around 77% of all jobs in Africa. Business education in the region has the power to boost entrepreneurship and drive the African economy
Idea generation and mentorship are key for Africa’s young, budding entrepreneurs Earlier this year, daily online news portal SME South Africa ran an extraordinary story about Brandon Kynoch, a 16-year-old entrepreneur from South Africa.
Brandon, a completely self-taught programmer, developed the game Torus. The first day it featured on the App Store it received 100,000 downloads in 24 hours and was Game of the Day in 137 app stores worldwide.
An outstanding feat, and one that evokes optimism—for once, a tech whizz who hails from somewhere other than the US or China.
Nonetheless, the article also taps into a systemic problem within South Africa—an inability to procure and keep hold of its top talent. Indeed, the article headline suggested Brandon could be ‘SA’s Best Tech Export’, and the piece finishes with him asserting his aspirations to further his craft at MIT or Stanford, in the US.
Owen Skae, the director of Rhodes Business School in South Africa, says he’s in no doubt that there is enormous potential on the African continent as a whole; the sum of a young population and tremendous natural resources.
But, the cost of doing business, he adds, curtails many entrepreneurs from pursuing their ambitions at home.
The potential of the continent is not restricted to those just present and on the ground there. McKinsey & Company reported recently that Africa is ‘a 1.2 billion-person market on the cusp of transformative growth’.
Acha Leke, chairman of McKinsey & Company’s Africa offices, Mutsa Chironga, an executive at Nedbank and an alum of McKinsey’s Johannesburg office, and Georges Desvaux, a senior partner for McKinsey in Hong Kong, have also just published a book, Africa’s Business Revolution , a definitive guide to doing business in the region.
According to their research, there are 400 companies in Africa that earn annual revenues of US$1 billion—‘they are on average both faster growing and more profitable than their global peers’.
To complement the large corporates, they say, Africa’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have to bolster their offering and dream big.SMEs are the cog that keep the economic growth of developing nations turning. Without them, the system jams and risks grinding to a halt. McKinsey quote the World Bank in their article, that estimates SMEs are responsible for 77% of all jobs in […]
