Youth business advisers must play key role in entrepreneurship success
SA faces a ticking time bomb of youth unemployment that requires urgent interventions that will create an enabling ecosystem for entrepreneurially inclined young entrepreneurs to thrive.
SA’s youth unemployment rate now sits at 66.5%, which is a dire indication of the severity of the socioeconomic issues that plague SA’s youth.
The SA youth over the last decade have faced numerous challenges in various sectors, a prime example being the Fees Must Fall protests that emanated from the frustration of young black university entrants, who come from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, who could not afford to access institutions of higher learning due to the exorbitant costs associated with registering for their studies, affording basic meals for sustenance and the high costs of tuition fees.
This formal tertiary level education would enable them to completely have a fighting chance in their job-seeking exploits in the labour market or even enable them to become entrepreneurial and thus become part of a new generation of young, educated, innovative entrepreneurs that this country so desperately needs.
Amid all those challenges, the government has started aggressively encouraging the youth to look at entrepreneurship as a viable alternative to earn a living and improve their material conditions.
It is, however, extremely difficult for the youth to start their own businesses due to some market structure constraints that hinder their progress.
These include lack of information, high costs of data to access information, high transport costs associated with travelling to hubs of information, lack of funding support, centralised business support, inaccessible business support for townships and villages, using old training and development interventions to modern social issues affecting youth, lack of youth business advisers in the business development support sector, lack of regulation in the business development sector and the monopolisation of the business development support sector by a few entities thus hindering new market entrants.
The reality is that we need 1,000 young business advisers in five years now, to be trained and equipped with the requisite skills to enter the business development sector as an urgent intervention.
These young business advisers must have the requisite formal academic qualifications, must have at least three to five years of business experience, a demonstrated track record of starting and growing their own business, and must be mentored and growth-wheel certified.
This will enable the business development support sector to organically transform and enable new market entrants to penetrate the sector with a view to disrupt and tamper with old and ineffective business support, business coaching, business training methodologies, models and implementation mechanisms.
These young business advisers will become relatable to the struggles of the constituency they seek to serve, guide them based on generational business struggle relations while encouraging and boosting them to become the captains of industry of tomorrow.
The existing big business development support agencies need to identify a first phase high-level cohort of this new generation of young business advisers, incubate them and provide them with a “train the trainer” approach for them to fully understand the sector, help them understand the levers required to implement programmes for the sector, and to manage performance and impact of interventions that will enable the young business advisers to empower our young entrepreneurs to become sustainable.
Sandile Mjamba, entrepreneur, economic strengthening specialist and business leader