How Africa can instil entrepreneurship as a tool of development

15th September 2015

How Africa can instil entrepreneurship as a tool of development

Aliko Dangote
Photo by: Reuters

Over the past 20 years, Africa has been steadily growing and is expected remain one of the fast growing regions in the near future. Central to this is entrepreneurship and the role of entrepreneurs.

The idea of entrepreneurship proposed here is one where African people play a key role in economic activities. They study and practice entrepreneurship in a focused fashion in order to control their own economic destinies. In this way, entrepreneurship becomes a conscious lifelong programme of mastering capital to improve productivity and quality of life for the largest number of people.

An entrepreneurial organisation is one that has grown revenues, jobs or profits in the past five years by several multiples of GDP growth. These organisations grow large by introducing new products, services and sometimes even undermining existing ones.

Cellphone groups MTN and Vodacom represent this picture in South Africa. On the other hand, fixed line provider Telkom was found to be unresponsive to the growing demand for telecommunications services.

Typical entrepreneurs include Strive Masiyiwa, Aliko Dangote, Kaizer Motaung, the Kunene Brothers, Richard Maponya and many others running multi-million rand enterprises across the continent.

Harnessing different forms of capital

The entrepreneur then is the person or team that masters the art of forming, mobilising and deploying capital for the best return over time. Capital is simply anything that can be used to produce goods or services. African entrepreneurs have yet to get a proper grip of what capital is.

Collaboration and professionalism are two key ingredients for building an entrepreneurial culture and base that can sustain decent living standards for Africans.

The Conversation

Sandile Swana, Lecturer at Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.