A Recipe for Job Creation in Africa (that works) – Get the Report and See How We Do it
Author: The Human Entrepreneur - Finding Entrepreneurs, Building Businesses, Creating Jobs
South Africa’s unemployment rate has continued to climb from 30,1% in 2020 to a record high of 34,4% in 2021 (StatsSA, 2020), as the impact of the Covid- 19 lockdown takes full effect on the economy.
At a time like this, there is a critical need for viable solutions to igniting economic development, and South Africa’s emerging businesses are at the centre of this discussion.
South Africa is Struggling
Despite our diverse offering of Business Acceleration and Incubation programmes, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows a history of poor success with South Africa continuing to have one of the highest business start-up failure rates in the world. Even post incubation, in excess of 70% of small businesses are reported to fail, according to SEDA (2019).
A Solution for Africa, Proven in Africa
The Human Entrepreneur has developed a disruptive approach to business acceleration and pre-incubation called “The Rapid Job Creation Programme”. It is a new programme designed around the needs of necessity-driven entities, with the aim of capacitating young people with entrepreneurial potential to become small business owners, by focussing on the immediacy of their needs.
In November 2020 we took 57 youth from disadvantaged areas around Johannesburg, South Africa. They had to build a business in 21 days that make enough profit to sustain themselves financially. Results: 30 businesses in 21 days (73% female owned), after 8 months 53% are still trading and providing jobs for 25 people. We reduced the cost of job creation to just over $1,500 per job.
What Makes Us Different?
The majority of entrepreneurship education programmes use an ‘education for enterprise’ model (Timmons & Spinelli, 2004), focussing only on skills development and not practical application. By contrast, very few are concerned with using the venture creation process as a practical tool for assisting participants to develop the attributes and skills they learn in the programme (Kirby, 2004).The Rapid Job Creation Programme uses the education through enterprise approach, transferring learning from the classroom to practice, which makes it possible to complete the learning cycle, by moving from classroom discussions to testing out concepts in new situations, thereby gaining concrete experience, and shifting the emphasis from passive to active learning. This approach to learning business development skills was something that stood out to participants.
Data collected on the pre-course questionnaire indicated that only 36% of the participants had some kind of previous knowledge and skills around small business development. Post-course data collection showed that 100% of participants felt they had gained extensive knowledge and skills that were practically useful for promoting and managing the growth of their businesses.
Want to Know How We Did It?
Get a copy of our Impact Assessment Report – Send us an email to hello@thehumanentrepreneur.org
