The Sunday News
Simba Jemwa, Business Correspondent
A NEWLY formed regional entrepreneurship association has identified youth development as key to addressing unemployment and small to medium enterprise growth.
The Bulawayo Entrepreneurs Foundation (BEF) believes that to address youth unemployment, there is a need to shift youths’ efforts from seeking jobs to creating marketable opportunities for themselves. With the emergence of Covid-19, the dire situation in Bulawayo only got worse with more companies being forced to lay off or further downscale.
However, through the National Development Strategy-1 which is part of Vision 2030, integrating entrepreneurship and innovation into education has been identified as key to achieving a middle-income economy.
The Second Republic has been developing strategies to ensure and encourage business incubation centres and Government support can drive market-creating innovation.
BEF is pursuing a shift towards the development of young innovators to head their own corporations that will target areas of non-consumption which can create significant wealth and, in turn, have considerable transformative developmental influences on society.
“Instead of relying on big businesses to inspire economic growth and create employment opportunities, Bulawayo needs to focus on scaling efforts to support young local innovators and equipping them with the requisite business skills and knowledge.
Statistics suggest a considerable number of educated youths in Bulawayo are unemployed due to the existing obstacles to economic growth which include the illegal sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the West,” said BEF chief executive Mr Kwanele Nyathi.
Mr Nyathi continued: “Bulawayo, much like most of the country, needs to invest in skills-development programmes for unemployed youth. In the past, unemployment initiatives have failed to effectively lead to employment for youths.
Most of these programmes tend to be labour-intensive and thus target able-bodied youths who — more often than not — do not get the opportunity to pursue higher education.”
By integrating entrepreneurship and innovation in the school curriculum, BEF believes it can give youths the support needed to create market/employment opportunities.
This would help reduce the rate of unemployment among the youths, which in Bulawayo and the Matabeleland region has been steadily increasing.
One of the most crucial attributes identified by the BEF for consideration for effective market-creating innovation is the establishment of inter-dependent business architecture.
Such inter-dependent provisions, such as business incubation centres, ensure innovators are protected from uncertainties as they begin to implement their ideas.
“A business incubation centre is a unique and highly flexible environment that combines business development procedures, infrastructure and people to nurture and grow small businesses through their initial development stages,” said Mr Nyathi. – @RealSimbaJemwa
