Saturday 15 February 2014

Promoting Social Entrepreneurship to methodically alleviate Youth Unemployment in Africa


Karagaba Baldwins
Chief Executive Officer, Young African Leadership Forum

Abstract: 

The majority of our people in Africa, now mainly the youth due to their overwhelming demographic numbers, are poor. Our government systems are growing bigger and more bureaucratic loading a heavier burden on the investor and labor tax paying sections of society, hence making it the more difficult for the unemployed to get that desired employment. 

Central to the problem of poverty is the availability of work. Work allows people to produce for themselves (i.e. food) and earn the money needed to buy goods and services. It is also from work that wealth is created which, through taxation, allows governments to fund pro-poor services such as health care, clean water and education. Work, more specifically decent work, is not easily created, however. It develops out of a complex and balanced system of economic, social and political activity. Work creation and availability is central to the fight against poverty and as in this paper’s case, youth unemployment. 

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else. So, the question before us is, why don’t we decisively work with and tap into this pool of willful societal changers to usher in the solution toward one of the most pressing challenges on the African continent, which is youth unemployment? 

This paper puts at the fore front the need to foster and hugely incentivize the development of the social entrepreneurial culture in Africa’s economies if the challenge of youth unemployment is to be effectively handled. I have out lined five basic recommendations on behaviors that all key decision making stakeholders in the sphere of employment creation should adopt toward social entrepreneurship in order to achieve considerable youth unemployment reduction results; 

1. Maximizing the impact of a stronger private sector and economic growth by providing real technical and financial policy incentives to those social entrepreneurial start ups and grown up enterprises, so that real permanence can be assured in those initiatives with the view of generating and sustaining permanent and competitively well paying jobs 

2. Concerted efforts by governments to recognize and reward social entrepreneurial employers ought to be introduced and stepped up where they are already existent. 

3. Practical business and social entrepreneurial skills development investment by tertiary learning institutions 

4. Public, private partnership Youth Employment quotas 

5. Governments should adopt and expand proven and working social entrepreneurial initiatives while making the initiators central figures in such programs. 


Introduction 

A lot has been tried to break the invisible links of poverty and more so, chronic youth unemployment in Africa for decades with international aid, relief, and development but such interventions to “save Africa” more often than not, spark a disastrous domino effect, however well intended. Nevertheless, it is being noticed persistently that local grown solutions and interventions are winning more lasting positive results and impact in as much as at times they don’t cover enormous scale. These local or community-inbred solutions are in most cases inceptions of individuals right now in the scholarly world we call, social entrepreneurs. Quite recently, they have come to be synonymously labeled as impact-preneurs due to the reputation most of them have built of expressing the capacity to genuinely uplift members with in their own community and create long-term change. 

So, as it’s the task of this paper to delineate a possibility realism on one of the ways the unemployment challenge on the African continent can be more effectively tackled, we will be compelled to appreciate the potential social entrepreneurial practice/industry has to catalytically contribute toward the reduction of youth unemployment to negligible levels. Thus if the right systemic and policy support frame work is deliberately promoted. 

The majority of our people in Africa, now mainly the youth due to their overwhelming demographic numbers, are poor. Our government systems are growing bigger and more bureaucratic loading a heavier burden on the investor and labor tax paying sections of society, hence making it the more difficult for the unemployed to get that desired employment. Even the old cherished funnels of foreign aid are apparently getting drier and rarer, inevitably pushing any sane individual or political leadership to seek more of local bred and engineered solutions. Poverty can not continuously be combated with complacency and pure idealism here in Africa. An artisan and pragmatic devotion to raw and untested approaches to helping our people be salvaged from this life-devaluing entanglement has to be adopted. We will seriously need and have to support people with fresh methods and thinking, if our youth particularly are to find employment with decent work, so as to avoid the repercussions of what the indignity of unemployment yields. 



Central to the problem of poverty is the availability of work. Work allows people to produce for themselves (i.e. food) and earn the money needed to buy goods and services. It is also from work that wealth is created which, through taxation, allows governments to fund pro-poor services such as health care, clean water and education. Work, more specifically decent work, is not easily created, however. It develops out of a complex and balanced system of economic, social and political activity. Work creation and availability is central to the fight against poverty and as in this paper’s case, youth unemployment. 

A recent study about African unemployed youth by the ILO economics Research unit on youth labor in Africa found out different encouraging attitude developments which even make it much more possible to providing employment to the youth of this continent. 


Unemployed young people in Middle Income Countries (MICs) are less inclined to start their own business than those in poor countries. Figure 1 shows that among unemployed and discouraged youth, those in poor countries are the most likely to have a plan to start a business. Among the unemployed in LICs, 35%, compared with only 19% of the unemployed in UMICS, have a business plan. Similarly, young people with less education are more likely to save money to start a business than their contemporaries with higher education. These results indicate a shift of attitude among the young. As education and a country’s income levels increase the young are more likely to expect salaried employment. Although this is to a certain extent backed by a higher likelihood of finding such employment, it also inhibits job creation through young entrepreneurs. 

What this implies is that, if you have the poor young people with a willingness to start up their own work so as to generate their own income and create wealth, then its only a certain form of reliable leadership and support that is needed for that objective to be realized. Usually, with external interventions if available, this support is extremely hard to effectively deliver. Its only people on the ground stationed as the burden bearers in responsibility terms, thus assisting to address or intervene in such challenges, that have the capacity to most effectively and sustainably implement the solutions deemed needful, even by external experts. Therefore, it behooves any policy maker, bureaucrat or philanthropist, to always first identify local existent solutions to local challenges before propounding expert interventions, if serious transformation is to be experienced. 

The argument is that so many youth are thinking properly and attempting to do so many things both social and commercial as to generate employment to themselves and others. However, policy makers and other interventionists who have the capacity to catalyze the material success of such initiatives are inventing a different will for these people which when attempted for practice; its adaptability proves to be a mere phantom. 


Social entrepreneurship 

This is the recognition of a social problem and the uses of entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a social venture to achieve a desired social change. While a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit returns, a social entrepreneur also measures positive returns to society. Its enterprise and effort-benefits are beyond proprietary and self but more to the general society’s benefit. Thus, the main aim of social entrepreneurship is to further broaden social, cultural, and environmental goals. Social entrepreneurs are commonly associated with the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors, but this doesn’t preclude profit making, its just that profit making isn’t the prime objective.. 

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else. So, the question before us is, why don’t we decisively work with and tap into this pool of willful societal changers to usher in the solution toward one of the most pressing challenges on the African continent, which is youth unemployment? 


Why "Social" Entrepreneur? 

Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale. 

Social entrepreneurs are people who have noticed a need in their community or somewhere in the world, and have come up with a way of remedying that issue through the application of market principles. The remedy could be creative, innovative, “out of the box,” etc... since most entrepreneurs tend to think in this manner. In general, most modern day social entrepreneurs did not start out with the goal of making money, but in the long run, develop into a for-profit business but maintaining the prime objective as initially designed. 

There are continuing arguments over precisely who counts as a social entrepreneur. The lack of consensus on the definition of social entrepreneurship means that other disciplines are often confused with and mistakenly associated with social entrepreneurship. Philanthropists, social activists, environmentalists, and other socially-oriented practitioners are usually referred to as social entrepreneurs. 

It is important to set the function of social entrepreneurship apart from other socially oriented activities and identify the boundaries within which social entrepreneurs operate. Some have advocated restricting the term to founders of organizations that primarily rely on earned income 

– meaning income earned directly from paying consumers. Others have extended this to include contracted work for public authorities, while still others include grants and donations. This argument is unlikely to be resolved soon. Peter Drucker, for example, once wrote that there was nothing so entrepreneurial as creating a new university: yet in most developed countries the majority of university funding comes from the state. 

Youth social entrepreneurship 

This is an increasingly common approach to engaging youth voice in solving social problems. Youth organizations and programs promote these efforts through a variety of incentives to young people

In this case, Africa has got so many spread out youth social entrepreneurs, full of hugely passionate and talented young people attempting to salvage different communities in their neighborhood from the gruesome ills affecting them. Some examples are; 

Ø The YouthActionNet fellowship, which provides young change makers with ideas, resources, and connections to other like-minded people around the world, ultimately strengthening the global peer-to-peer support system. 

Ø YaYa Education Trust (YET) founded by Benard Wakoli, which is committed to alleviating 

poverty and combating “gender apartheid” toward women and girls within the rural Mumias district in Kenya. He created the Community Goat Bank Project to enable women entrepreneurs to become financially independent while also providing food for the family. By donating the goat’s offspring to another marginalized woman in the community, she will empower another to rise out of poverty. The increased income allows these women and girls to afford education and health services while increasing awareness for human rights and leveling gender discrimination. 

Ø The Yonso Project founded by Kwabena Danso in rural Ghana, which provides 

community-based education and empowerment for the Yonso community. It uses scholarships, microfinance for rural women, Teach for Rural Ghana program, and Bamboo Bicycle Project as a platform for impact. Its campaign, Mentoring and Guidance for Rural School Children, creates an opportunity for 200 10-18 year old kids to be educated on their rights, mentored on their goals and roles in the community, and trained on facing sex issues through a three-day camp retreat. 

Ø The Tanzania Youth Environmental Network (TAYEN) sets up student-led, environmental clubs 

in schools to address sustainability issues such as deforestation, climate change, the lack of clean water access, and illnesses from insufficient sanitation. It helps youths identify destructive practices and inspires them to take initiative on environmental conservation. Although TAYEN’s campaign is forthcoming, keep an eye out for this organization incubating the future environmental leaders of Tanzania. 

Ø Young African Leadership Forum (YALF) founded by the author of this paper, provides 

leadership and governance mentorship through training projects, contemporary debate competitions, open community intervention projects, orientation in advocacy for pro- young people policies amongst young people and youth. 

It’s laudable to see the effort and immense investment NGOs and their tireless, passionate members put in to improve lives everyday in Africa. Whether building infrastructure for safe drinking water or selling tote bags to feed malnourished children, they all help secure a better future for the marginalized, the oppressed, and the impoverished. But the impact of sharing a goat’s offspring, educating and mentoring youths, or inspiring students to take action on conservation initiatives may not be apparently heroic in the CNN eye catching massive sense but it’s certainly immediate, its reliable because its home grown solutions and its solutions that can be adopted as economic or social-challenges intervention models, including the battle to scale down youth unemployment. 

Poverty 

Employment or the lack of it and poverty are significantly related. The more a society’s people are unemployed and with out productive work opportunities, the more likely that society is to be poor. This unambiguously implies that, the more of youth have no productive work and are unemployed, the greater the entrenchment of poverty in such communities and more specifically in this demographic pushing them into a fatal future of misery and many other ultra-society consequences. A clear understanding that youth who are unemployed are categorically poor or on the verge of gliding into the poverty pit, will help to push the point home to those that are supposed to see through the adoption of the solution propounded in this paper toward the youth unemployment challenge. So, poverty generally needs to be vigorously dealt with for the purpose of ensuring that our youth are employed and also vice versa. Social entrepreneurial efforts will massively assist in this pursuit. 

The concept of poverty includes material deprivation (i.e. food, shelter) and access to basic services (i.e. health, education). It now also tends to encompass a range of nonmaterial conditions, such as a lack of rights, insecurity, powerlessness and indignity. The combination of these two types of conditions provides a more complete understanding of poverty. It also makes it more difficult to measure poverty and to evaluate the effectiveness of poverty reduction activities. Even finding an adequate definition is difficult and many policy statements prefer to describe the nature of poverty instead of providing a specific definition. 

In Working out of Poverty, the ILO notes that poverty is a “vicious circle of poor health, reduced working capacity, low productivity and shortened life expectancy” (ILO, 2003, p. 1). The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee has defined poverty as comprising multiple “dimensions of deprivation that relate to human capabilities, including consumption and food security, health, education, rights, voice, security, dignity and decent work” (OECD, 2001). It notes that poverty reduction should, in addition, be conducted in the context of environmental sustainability and gender equity. 

Poverty is a condition in which people lack satisfactory material resources (food, shelter, clothing, housing), are unable to access basic services (health, education, water, sanitation), and are constrained in their ability to exercise rights, share power and lend their voices to the institutions and processes which affect the social, economic and political environments in which they live and work. This indicates that even the available work in the employment sector shouldn’t be appreciated unquestionably per se as a mere engagement setting but for its credibility should be assessed in four dimensions; productivity, remunerative value to workers, workers’ rights, room for social dialogue and availability of social security. Its not merely about work, or else you can have masses of people engaged in work but continue in poverty, quite a common characteristic in Africa. 

On average 72% of the youth population in Africa live with less than USD 2 per day. The incidence of poverty among young people in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia and Burundi is over 80% (World Bank, 2009). The highest rates of poverty can be observed among young women and young people living in rural areas. But the costs go much deeper. The first years in the labour market, the skills developed and the experience then accumulated considerably affect young people’s future professional development. Long spells of unemployment or underemployment in informal work can “permanently impair future productive potential and therefore employment opportunities” (Guarcello et al., 2007). For the few that manage to obtain a formal sector job, which offers increasing wages, initial unemployment can have significant negative effects on lifetime earnings (OECD, 2010). 



Youth unemployment 

Young people aged between 15 and 25 represent more than 60 per cent of the continent’s total population and account for 45 per cent of the total labour force. Unlike other developing regions, sub-Saharan Africa’s population is becoming more youthful, with youth as a proportion of the total population projected at over 75 per cent by 2015, due to the high fertility rate underlying the demographic momentum. It is expected that this increase in the number of young people will not decline before 20 years or more. 

With almost 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, Africa has the youngest population in the world. And it keeps growing rapidly. The number of young people in Africa will double by 2045. Between 2000 and 2008, Africa’s working age population (15-64 years) grew from 443 million to 550 million; an increase of 25%. In annual terms this is a growth of 13 million, or 2.7% per year (World Bank 2011a). If this trend continues, the continent’s labour force will be 1 billion strong by 2040, making it the largest in the world, surpassing both China and India (McKinsey Global Institute, 2010). 

Africa’s youth population is not only growing rapidly, it is also getting better educated in some regions. Based on current trends, 59% of 20-24 year olds will have had secondary education in 2030, compared to 42% today. This will translate into 137 million 20-24 year olds with secondary education and 12 million with tertiary education in 2030 (Figure 2). Although significant quality gaps remain, these trends offer an unrivalled opportunity for economic and social development if the talents of this swiftly increasing reservoir of human capital are harnessed and channeled towards the productive sectors of the economy. However, they could also present a significant risk and threat to social cohesion and political stability if Africa fails to create sufficient economic and employment opportunities to support decent living conditions for this group. 

The incidence of youth unemployment in sub- Saharan African is estimated to be over 20 per cent. Too often, vocational training is seen as a means to “help bring young people back” when the basic education system has failed (the notion of giving a second chance), or as a top-up to the basic knowledge base young people will need, to help prepare them for the immediate needs of the world of work (the notion of continuous adaptation or re-adaptation to a flexible and constantly changing labour market). This type of vocational training needs be replaced or supplemented by an educational option which can provide young people with a maximum set of durable achievements in terms of literacy, basic knowledge and lifelong learning skills. Its at this point that social entrepreneurial efforts have to fuse with other external and government efforts to engineer proper and viable solutions to this challenge. 

Some of the most powerful of these barriers to employment opportunities for many young people are: lack of job creation, vulnerability of young workers to layoffs when economic growth falters, high labour costs or unrealistic wage expectations on the part of youth, discrimination (i.e. negative attitudes towards inexperienced young workers), poor access to fundamental education (e.g. the lack of skills from limited job experience and hence little access to on-the-job training), government policies that discourage work, rapid economic change, and the compounded labour-market disadvantages that accompany poverty. 

Although many jobs have been created, there have not been enough to accommodate the number of young people in search of work. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that between 2000 and 2008 Africa created 73 million jobs, but only 16 million for young people aged between 15 and 24. As a result, many young Africans find themselves unemployed or, more frequently, underemployed in informal jobs with low productivity and pay. Of Africa’s unemployed, 60% are young people and youth unemployment rates are double those of adult unemployment in most African countries. The problem is particularly acute in middle-income countries (MICs). In 2009 in North Africa youth unemployment was 23.4%, and the ratio of youth-to-adult unemployment rates was estimated at 3.8. In South Africa, youth unemployment was 48% and the ratio of youth-to-adult unemployment rates was estimated at 2.5. Among the employed young, the proportion of work in informality is significantly higher than that of adults. 


Recommendations: Support approaches toward social entrepreneurship as to reduce and eventually alleviate youth unemployment 

1. Maximizing the impact of a stronger private sector and economic growth by providing real technical and financial policy incentives to those social entrepreneurial start ups and grown up enterprises, so that real permanence can be assured in those initiatives with the view of generating and sustaining permanent and competitively well paying jobs. Once this is done, the pressure on the mainstream private sector and public sphere job market will be lessened helping companies and governments to hire out of necessity rather than for reasons of political correctness. 

2. Concerted efforts by governments to recognize and reward social entrepreneurial employers ought to be introduced and stepped up where they are already existent. A survey among country experts shows that employers’ hesitations about hiring young job seekers are serious obstacles for the young in many African countries (Figure 3). Employers everywhere prefer candidates with experience over those without it. Especially where education systems are generally poor, job seekers without working experience are likely to have few relevant skills and employers would need to invest in training. 

Waiting for those young people who already have some experience allows employers to benefit from the training that job seekers might have received elsewhere. Experience can also be evidence of the employability of a young person. Given the large numbers of the unemployed young in Africa, employers can easily reject job seekers without any experience because there will be many others available who already have some experience. As long as the large surplus of unemployed youth persists, the only way of ensuring that its dealt with effectively is by providing greater capacities and moral support to those community-centric but not profit driven initiatives. Usually such initiatives are ready to employ most youth talent because of the need to do the jobs more on the basis of conviction and passion, thence implying that governments ought to put viable focus on such social entrepreneurial individuals 

3. Practical business and social entrepreneurial skills development investment by tertiary learning institutions 
As part of a solution finding effort, I believe the fundamental role-play of entrepreneurship and business teaching institutions might have to be adopted. Universities and other tertiary bodies of the same category should go beyond teaching students how to do business or be entrepreneurial, instead should add on establishing business building and existent entrepreneurial demonstration firms, thus stepping out of the time wasting theoretical web. These firms and enterprises can be started by business course work groups, probably from their second year, but under the institution’s ownership. The students can practically exercise their knowledge they get from books and professors by running that business with over sight form faculty administrators. They should be let free to start off a business or social entrepreneurial project choice, after all they can all lead to this very objective of employment delivery to these young people. This is based on the premise that these tertiary institutions will take social entrepreneurship seriously as a viable field of productivity and eventually economic growth. Higher learning institutions should jettison the cynical bias against social entrepreneurship as though it’s a practice of disoriented people, simply because first priority is not dedicated to profiteering. 

When students graduate, they can be given a chance to continue as employees there or advised otherwise, a purely students’ program. This implies that the students’ performance rating before they matriculate from the course will be an assessment combination based both the knowledge retention and business demonstration work results. 

For those working on employment issues, one thing is clear: the tense imbalance between the demands of the labor market and the supply of appropriately skilled workers is reaching its breaking point. Mid 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute launched a report entitled, “The world at work: jobs and skills for 3.5 billion people”. The report found that by 2020 there could be as many as 40 million too few high-skill workers and up to 95 million too many low-skill workers out in the job market. 

Avoiding such massive imbalances will require a radical approach to accelerate education and skills building, and to boost job creation for less-skilled young workers. Anything less and we will see a growing shortage of high-skill workers, persistent joblessness for many low- and middle-skill workers, rising income inequality, and distressingly high rates of youth unemployment. The numbers are clear: by 2030, the world will have as many as 1 billion workers without even secondary education, and most of them will be living in India, South Asia and Africa. 

If we seriously want to deal with the youth unemployment problem, this failing education system will have to be confronted head on and all complacency kicked out with utterly new modes of teaching and training geared toward productivity. The education policy makers should no longer design their agenda of human development with the target pressure of providing information, I guess Google has taken care of that, so they shouldn’t be so worried. Their concern should be about relevant skillfulness and productivity potentials of their people. This cant be purely achieved through class rooms but instead also in the general practice-field of society where two major drivers of employment creation usually take place; business and social entrepreneurs. 

4. Public, private partnership Youth Employment quotas 

Young people with higher education, in particular, are often unwilling to take jobs that do not fit their profile and may well offer lower pay or less job security than they expect. There should be a labor industrial policy that encourages or in some sectors obligates both private firms/companies and public institutions to provide a specific quota of jobs from amongst those available per year, probably 70 or 60% youth employment quota. This practice possesses in itself the social entrepreneurial ethic, seeking to salvage our young people from the doldrums of preventable misery rather than the greed-force of profit primacy. 

For young people without education this share is only 8%. Along similar lines, De Vreyer and Roubaud (2012) find that in the early 2000s in West Africa 82% of jobs created were in the informal sector, but only 48% of the young wanted informal sector jobs. The public sector, which created virtually no jobs in the two years preceding the survey (fewer than 4% of new jobs), was still the target of 27% of young people's aspirations. 

For instance, many governments invest in job information systems, but with questionable effectiveness. Public agencies are generally not very successful in helping young people find work: in Algeria, the ANEM (National Agency for Employment) has been able to find jobs for only about 11% of those registering and ANAPEC (National Agency for Promoting Employment and Skills) in Morocco about 9% (Barbier, 2006; Achy 2010; European Commission, 2010). In advanced economies, such systems are usually linked to unemployment benefits. 

Private agencies can be more effective than public agencies, but only work with the urban formal sector as they are to a larger extent oriented towards employers’ needs and provide services within smaller and targeted segments of the labour market. However, they generally focus on the most easily placed unemployed and concentrate on metropolitan areas, ignoring the other parts of the country (Angel- Urdinola et al, 2010). 

5. Governments should adopt and expand proven and working social entrepreneurial initiatives while making the initiators central figures in such programs. The reason for this emphasis on governments having to design more private and non governmental sector development for greater employment delivery is to combat the prevalent attitude fixation on preference for government jobs regardless whether those jobs have same or lesser benefits than the ones offered by the private sector. The thinking by most African youth that its safer and more comfortable to be a civil servant is very dangerous and definitely precarious for any sought after economic development. 

Therefore, let governments work ardently with both the private business and social entrepreneurial sectors to enhance the appeal and security of the employment being offered so that the young people can seek jobs from there but also be inspired to take risks in starting enterprises of their own. Political processes should allow them to express their views and produce policy changes, instability can result, as it did last year in a number of North African countries. 

Figure 5 shows their answers to the question: “Assuming equal pay and benefits, where would you prefer to work?” in seven North African countries. Egypt and Tunisia, the two North African Arab Spring countries, have the largest proportions of youth who prefer government employment to private sector jobs or self-employment. In Egypt 53% of the young want a government job, but only 18% of those aged 25- 29 have one. In Tunisia 46% of youth want a government job, but the proportion of the 25-29 age group with a government job is the same as in Egypt. In both countries, employment with private business seems to have no appeal to young people. This large gap between young people’s expectations and the reality of the job market has undoubtedly caused much frustration and will continue to do so until expectations have adjusted. The expectations gap also causes higher youth unemployment since young people hold out for the expected public sector job instead of searching for work in the private sector. 

Creating more public sector employment cannot be a sustainable response to this gap. Public employment proportions are already very high in North African countries. Instead efforts must be made to help young people develop realistic expectations and to create a strong private sector, capable of offering attractive jobs. 

Conclusion

There is a great lady called Michelle Cave in Burkina Faso who spear heads cave forming cooperatives of women enabling girl children to walk safely miles to school, under the watchful eyes of groups of women at checkpoints along the route - rotated encampments where mangos are collected, juiced and transported by passing trucks to Bobo Dialasso factory. You can purely see a simple humanity of women who have turned their children-society into a general family affair yet with out neglect to economic productivity. Multitudes of people all across this continent, including youth, are doing and willing to even do more for their immediate and far communities with out seeking for so much in return. They are seeking for the dignity of all, common laughter and gladness and a peace of society that doesn’t have to be so divisive with the extremities of the haves and the impoverished.

Social entrepreneurship provides an indisputable frontier of limitless elastic employment growth for not only our youth but also the other demographic categories. We can be still progressively competitive and profitably successful societies in Africa with meticulously vibrant public and commercial-private sectors but with a formidable societal cohesion based on a well supported and developed social entrepreneurial culture.

FOUNDATION HELPS WOMEN DISCOVER THEMSELVES

By Prof. Waswa Balunywa and Diana Nandagire Ntamu


A local social enterprise in Iganga district was founded to help young people and women to get into employment. The Foundation based in Iganga was established by young people who had benefited from career guidance from a family in Iganga. The Foundation which was established in 2007 is intended to expose young people to various opportunities for self-employment and where possible to paid employment. It organizes training sessions including practical ones like soap making, candle making among others. The Foundation also focuses on women. At a training that lasted over 4 ½ hours, women were advised to dialogue with their husbands to enable them understand the need for women to work. 

Women were initially taken through the socialization process informing them how the differences between men and women emerge and how women had become the disadvantaged group.
The fundamental differences between men and women arise from biological differences. Men in the traditional society had taken advantage of this difference to create roles between men and women. These roles had kept women in the kitchen. Women were seen as people who are responsible for conceiving and bearing children. The consequence of this socialization has been to deny women certain rights that are ordinarily enjoyed by men. These include the right to education, right to property, right to space among others. For this reason women have failed to advance economically and socially. In developing countries, affirmative action and legislation have enabled change to take place in this process. Women now enjoy relatively more rights than before. In many developing countries including Uganda, women still perceive themselves as subservient to men and this has been perpetuated by the men themselves.

The Foundation invites women for training in empowerment. The Foundation sensitizes women about these facts and alerts women about the need for them to be gainfully employed while seeking acceptance of their husbands. The Foundation is pursuing a social objective of empowering women to improve their social and economic status. The training conducted included identification of the challenges that women face. Indeed women confessed that they were seen as objects in homes who should provide food even if no money was given to them. Husbands found it appropriate to stay out late and return to demand for food from their wives. Women accused men of having multiple relationships while they as women were not expected to do so. From women who worked, husbands expected them to meet the home budget without assistance from the men. The women were urged to find ways of discussing these matters with their husbands with a view to sensitizing them about the need for women to work while at the same time contribute meaningfully to the family budget. The Foundation invites facilitators who act as volunteers to cause a discussion on how best this can be achieved. Besides, this sensitization, women are also trained in activities of wealth creation; how to start a business, how to attract customers and how to improve businesses. Several women gave testimonies and some stated that their lives had changed as a result of this training. They had started businesses, others said they now understood the need to discuss with their husbands how to improve their lives and those of their families through work. Some had already discussed with their husbands and the husbands had allowed them to work. The women urged the trainers to convince their husbands to come for training if they were to be more successful in this social economic transformation. Some women reported negative results saying that their husbands had not allowed them to work despite the discussion they had had. (The name of the Foundation has not been disclosed for purposes of confidentiality).

Thursday 6 February 2014

US AMBASSSADOR LAUNCHES BWAISE YOUTH EMPLOYMENT CENTRE

By Prof. Waswa Balunywa and Diana Nandagire Ntamu

Mohammed Kisirisa, an alumni of YouthActionNet, a program of the International Youth Foundation created a centre in the slum of Bwaise, Kampala to help  young slum dwellers to turn around their lives through self-employment. Kisirisa, populary known as Slum Ambassador, has over the last few years been working with young people in slums mainly in Kampala area to change their lives by enabling them to have something to do.
Besides free vocational training, his organisation Action For Fundamental Change and Development (AFFCAD) has been working to mitigate the impact of HIV AIDS on youth in slums. He has been providing reproductive health education programmes, HIV AIDS educational programmes and testing young people for HIV AIDS. A large number of youth access free treatment through AFFCAD.

The slum dweller’s work has been recognised by the International Youth Foundation when he competed for the Global Fellowship Programme and now he is an alumni of the programme.
The Youth Employment Centre was opened on Friday January 24, 2014. It was funded by the US Embassy in Uganda following a project proposal he wrote to the embassy over the matter.
Ambassador Scott H. Delisi thanked Kisirisa for his effort and was pleased that the people of the US were able to make a contribution to change the lives of others.

We participated in this occasion and Ms. Diana Ntamu, the Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre, delivered a key note address at the event. Ms. Ntamu highlighted the growing importance of social entrepreneurs who are helping the world to improve the lives of the poor. She said that while government had a major role in addressing the poor people’s challenges, it did not have the capacity to do so. Social entrepreneurs were emerging to support government effort in this respect. She said the biggest challenge today was poor young people amidst low opportunities for employment. She thanked the slum ambassador for the initiative to address the challenges of unemployed youth. She said life in slums was by itself a challenge and not having a job was even a worse challenge.


She thanked the Ambassador for assistance. 

Social Entrepreneurship

By Prof. Waswa Balunywa and Diana Nandagire Ntamu
Makerere University Business School, Kampala, Uganda

In recent years, governments have been putting emphasis on entrepreneurship as a solution to the challenge of unemployment. For the developing countries, the emphasis on entrepreneurship has been much more important. Entrepreneurship is associated with business startup, innovation, job creation and wealth creation. Indeed, it is seen as an avenue for poverty eradication. Many countries especially the developing countries followed the economic track of the mixed economy where they allowed both government through parastatals and the private sector to play a role in economic development. Government bears a major role in providing an enabling atmosphere for the private sector to succeed. However, government expenditure is based on taxes collected from the private sector. Therefore government is constrained in its ability not only to provide an enabling atmosphere but also in driving growth in developing economies. This has led to the emergence of social entrepreneurs who have come in to contribute to the role of government by enabling disadvantaged people in starting business.


This was expressed in terms of philanthropy where the more fortunate people gave out to the less fortunate. With time, the concept changed to social responsibility of business and subsequently corporate social responsibility. This is where business people are obliged not only to ensure that they do not affect society negatively but they also deal with social problems. In recent years, this is being replaced by the concept of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. This is where an entrepreneur ordinarily works to create wealth like any other entrepreneur but does not seek individual benefit. Instead, the entrepreneur works to create wealth but is driven by social aims. Social entrepreneurship has therefore emerged in recent years as a phenomenon to support the additional government effort to stimulate development. The concept has already made tremendous progress in developed countries however it is making progress in the developing countries. Like main stream entrepreneurship, it is limited by the same factors. An enabling environment, education systems and resources. The MUBS Entrepreneurship Centre is working with the International Youth Foundation on a project now called Social Entrepreneurs Transforming Africa (SET Africa), to develop social entrepreneurship in Anglo Phone Africa. The Centre is the executing agency in Anglo Phone Africa.