How student entrepreneurs can benefit from AYESA
Africa’s Young Entrepreneurs (AYEEN) has come up with a novel initiative aimed at stimulating innovation and entrepreneurship among Africans.
This initiative, done through the instrumentality of Africa’s Young Entrepreneurs Student Association (AYESA), is targeted at identifying the links between entrepreneurship and education while also creating a lead way for Nigerian students to tap into big business opportunities in Africa.
This December 5, a conference themed ‘Entrepreneurship in Education’, will take at the University of Lagos (sport complex) on December 5, 2015, at 9a.m, to help steer innovation into young students in Nigeria.
This programme will provide student entrepreneurs with experience, knowledge, mentorship, business coaching programs and industry business skills as well as opportunity to exhibit their businesses for direct sales, marketing, networking and loans for expansion.
The program tag line #10,000JOBMAKERS will identify 10, 000 potential entrepreneurs and put them in an incubator to nurture their business and ideas through coaching and mentoring.
Registration is free for all young entrepreneurs via www.ayeonline.org orayesa.ayeonline.org.
Speaking at a press conference, Summy Francis, president, AYEEN, said he is happy that this is happening in Nigeria.
Francis said, having travelled round the continent, he is convinced that there are lots of students that are already entrepreneurs.
He said the programme will afford the students the opportunity of being in the incubator for 10 months.
“This is an initiative that has taken over 24 months. We are going into this because we are convinced that entrepreneurship is the only solution out there,” he said.
“We have found out that over 60 percent of Nigerian youths who leave the country are actually entrepreneurs. You will understand this when you see what they do abroad. We believe that if they are trained here, they will do exploits,” he stated.
The AYEEN president said it is high time the government of Nigeria and other African countries identified the talents in young people to translate opportunities into job creation.
He further urged the government to create the entrepreneurship ecosystem, stressing that Nigeria and Africa must transit from the analogue system to digital.
He further said that the project (the incubator) cost the organisation over $100,000 to put together, adding that the organisation already has 12 million members across the continent.
Ibada Ahmed, vice president, AYEEN, said there are over 600 million young people in Africa, with massive manpower and brain power.
According to Ahmed, Africa must utilise talents in the young entrepreneurs to develop, stressing that the fact that there are less than ten percent job availability in the continent shows that entrepreneurship is the only answer.
“People graduate, go out to look for jobs and come back without jobs. We must focus on private entrepreneurship to develop Africa,” she said, adding that it took the organisation three years to develop AYESA.
Olubunmi Oluwadare, head of the economic department and CEO of QuickPromo.Com, said as oil is consistently failing Nigeria, all attention must now be turned to entrepreneurship.
Oluwadare wondered why young Nigerians have not seen opportunity in manufacturing products that are often being imported into the country, stressing that it is now time to discard analogue and embrace digital.
ODINAKA ANUDU