Professor John Huston Stanfield
Director
ASARPI: Advanced Study of African Renaissance Policies Ideas Mauritius-Namibia-South Africa

“With a labour force of over 400 million that will surge by at least 70% before 2035, Africa is at a crossroads. The continent could either harness this active, viable human capital to deliver astronomical growth, or could suffer from even greater insecurity, unemployment and a host of economic challenges if this population is left idle.” Ifeyinwa Ugochukwu(2021) Chief Executive Officer, The Tony Elumelu Foundation.

It is often claimed in the East as well as in the West, entrepreneurship is the engine of future developmental empowerment in the continent of Africa. This is due to the well-observed empirical fact that sources of employment and wealth generation are so desperately needed on this populous continent, in which 60% are under age 25, with chronic scarcity of finances to educate the vast majority of the continental youth to be credentialed, to pass standard exams and enter the gates of large scale corporates, or the government and NGO sectors.

So, the majority of Africans are forced to create their own sources of capital through solo or small business enterprises, or continue to suffer from starvation, overwhelming personal debt, and inadequate accommodations and marginal, if any, access to law, health, and traditional and digital age technologies.
But with the vital importance of African entrepreneurs and their marginally economic enterprises being proclaimed, as the recent contents and outcomes of the 2022 White House African State Leaders Summit demonstrated, elite western focus is sorely on the creation and sustainability of big corporate business enterprises with the neglect of those vast majority of Africans who are entrepreneurs of small and otherwise, modest scale.

There are myths of societal development in legal post-colonial African nations still very much under the thumb of European descent colonial powers. These myths encourage the persistence of African entrepreneurial genius ideologies, while promoting western and growing eastern thinking and practices which have done much to contribute to African continental malaise called chronically toxic underdevelopment.

The well-institutionalized implantation of colonial bureaucracies in their various European-descent, administrative and linguistic cultural styles have been well alienated from indigenous African ways of understanding and implementing leadership and private/ public governance structures. It has been the insidious racist ways Africans have been controlled through forced adaptation ways of doing public administration and being beholden to western, and now growing eastern ways of organizing businesses as well as governments and ngo infrastructures And this is clearly seen in the universal neglect, let alone ignorance about indigenous and westernized/ easternized African entrepreneurship.

A most tragic neocolonial grip, former direct colonial powers have on their former, though still in too many ways actual, colonial subjects is certification procedures and certificates. The too widespread African government dependency on British Cambridge exams and their other colonial power equivalents, as a conservative and too often irrelevant talent-weeding out mechanism, is a travesty destroying the selfesteem and futures of millions of African youth and older adults each year, while reeling in huge profits for western corporate examination companies. Rather than using a more indigenous way to sort out talent and encourage youth to explore adult career options, the Cambridge exams place undue life or death pressure on youth and their parents and otherwise caregivers. And this is done with minority exam victors moving on to universities soon realizing the exam does not assure their collegial success and the majority who fail just drift or get a diploma which assures their marginal employment chances.

This standardized test driven mindset so ingrained in African education access and achievement government and private sector corporate creates the impression that a university degree and going to work for some sector or system, is more desirable than working on your own through your own entrepreneurial skills and devices. It thus devalues entrepreneurship, along with vocational training with or without getting a diploma. In the United States, in recent years, there has been a massive attempt to disconnect from this great money making myth that standardized tests like IQ tests and undergraduate and graduate entrance exams such as the SAT and GRE predict academic success (Gordon 2011).

This well-overdue tearing away of the lucrative academic success facade of standardized tests, and about the inferiority of entrepreneurial, and more broadly vocational, education has yet to hit the continent of Africa in major places such as the Association of African Universities and the African Union, which are attempting to change national and continent-wide hot button policy thinking and implementation. Entrepreneurship, in too many cases, is looked upon as a second option after failure to find a job to work for civil service or a corporation rather than something you do to unleash creativity because you want to do it even if the risk of failure is high. It is the reason why in most universities, at best in a business school, there is an entrepreneurship center; rather than entrepreneurship being the core value and approach of not only the business school, but of the entire campus.

It is becoming a trendy line in some public and private African universities leadership circles about entrepreneurizing the university but so far the resistance on the part of those weaned on and who benefit from the colonial ways of governing a nation, let alone a university, has stifled such changes beyond fantasy musings which go nowhere beyond some resume building ladder climbing exercise.

There are several thoughts which come to mind from this discourse so far which requires major rehauling in how African government, business, and civil society leaders think about and implement effective entrepreneur policies, realizing that most leaders in African countries have yet to even craft a supportive sense of entrepreneurship in their nations. This is even though as said earlier, entrepreneurship is the major way most Africans survive lest they work in government civil service or as workers in corporate service industries or in indigenous or international NGO sectors.

First thought, the big concern in most countries around the world is the massive numbers of university graduates who can’t find jobs in their fields and when they do, they don’t last. This problem, which has much to do with the poor workforce readiness that too many universities are experiencing, can be solved through public and private sector leaders working together to fund required undergraduate and graduate work experience degree requirements starting in the second year of enrollment. This will require learners to grasp the academic concepts of their majors and apply them in joint faculty and real life employers supervised modules starting in the second, rather than third or fourth usual undergraduate internship years.

Second, the flood of cash cow oriented private universities in Africa. The scarcity of institutions of higher learning in most African countries and the soaring African parental costs of sending children outside the continent, with 60% of the continent ‘s population being under 25 years of age is creating a rush of private
universities, most in the small mom and pop store variation, to set up shop. The dilemma is that most of these universities aggravate the problem of offering degree programs which stress traditional, “work for someone else jobs,” and too many offer certificates for skills no longer competitive for employment.
A third thought is that in traditional undergraduate or vocational school education, graduate studies, entrepreneur education or community-based workshops for entrepreneurs, there is an urgent need for teaching and learning strategies which privilege indigenous knowledge. Be it how African entrepreneurs
think cognitively about what they produce and how they market their goods and services, or how they do their accounting and financing or how they monitor/ evaluate what they are thinking and doing; their life experiences must be centerfold rather than marginalized or ignored. There is a growing literature about
this indigenous grounding of African entrepreneurs studies which deserves much more deepening, and linked to State and Civil Society policy decision-making, still in too many national contexts, are embedded in western and growing eastern norms and values.

Fourth is in regards to African girls and women entrepreneurs as well as youth female and male entrepreneurs. Girls, women, and as well as the fastest growing demographic on the continent –youth (1830) share the same dilemma. Namely, African governments and civil societies don’t know what to do with them. There is either a clash or serious disconnection between the growing demand for girls, women, and youth inclusive empowerment in the emerging human rights oriented 21st century, and African traditions which maintain second class or no class status of these three status populations. This clash/ disconnect is usually addressed in regards to educational and public health access girls, women, and youth experience on the continent, let alone the rest of the world. And certainly it has been widely known to be a severe problem in addressing the dismal female quality of life and institutional access and prosperous mobility in financial services, corporate big business, and entrepreneurship.

There is the additional frustration in the interest in African girls and women and youth entrepreneurs being rendered ineffectual in employing ideologies and models which homogenize and oversimplify these vital populations in chronic need of authentic human rights in the vast cultural diversity which embed the experiences of girls, women, and youth on the continent. Even when we properly, culturally and demographically, contextualize African girls and women and youth in their proper national and regional locations, we find a glaring paradox. Namely, females and youth are disproportionately entrepreneurs given their common survival needs to support their impoverished, often ill or underaged family members in the absence or abandonment of able-bodied adult men. Their survival needs forcing females and youth into entrepreneurship, often several hustles at once to make ends meet, is exacerbated by anti-female and anti-youth age discriminating government civil service, corporate businesses, and NGO sectors which refuse to hire and promote them especially beyond low paying entry level positions or higher positions with major leadership responsibilities .

When, incidentally, it comes to older age “senior citizen” economic well-being, especially for females, it is particularly a growing problem with people living longer with no African governments providing incentives and resources for still active older persons to become entrepreneurs, in lieu of not being able to continue to work due to retirement age policies and rampant obsolete ageist attitudes about the capabilities of older persons. This too common pervasive problem of female, youth, and older entrepreneurs being unable to find sustainable support in most African private and public sectors is greatly harmed by if not produced by dogooder,
well-intended mentoring and intervening programs, sponsored by external international NGOs, foundations, and governments which sooner or later end usually with no significant long term follow through.

Too often these programs raise hopes and aspirations of participants with great resume building opportunities, but have no substantial outcomes. This is because, at best, what happens is participants, especially those who spend time in some advanced developed countries getting mentored find their newly acquired knowledge rejected and thus ignored once they return home. I am thinking about a recent popular USA Fellowship Program which invites promising young adult Africans, many of them entrepreneurs, to spend months in the States in high powered mentoring opportunities. Most of them I have met on the continent have been unemployed once returned home, marginalized or excluded in their homelands since they no longer fit in and gatekeepers are resistant to hearing what they have to say. This is
because the Fellowship Program unfortunately does not teach them or effectively follow through with them about how to be effective change leaders once back home.

Fifth is the matter of financing African entrepreneurship. Too much of it, when it happens, comes from international nonprofit or international/ national/ local government financial resources, rather than from local indigenous communities. There is so much money wasted on marginally or irrelevant consumerism
in African communities rather than investing in African local communities, including supporting entrepreneurs. This is the well known, what some commentators call, leaky bucket mindset (Cunningham 2011) in which too much unnecessary money flows out of local African communities due to being spent on unnecessary consumer goods and services with no or little effort to organize local community capital acquired through informal and formal local entrepreneurship and other means like savings to create and sustain further entrepreneurship.

The converse is found in global Asian descent communities which build informal financial services networks offering entrepreneurship loans to community members with stringent payment requirements. This needs to be to be done in African and African Diasporas communities, with interventions to facilitate healthy trusting relationships which beget sustainable profit generating capital though grueling challenges in African and African Diasporas communities due to the contributions of white supremacy norms and values which divide and conquer and institutionalize deep roots of distrust in African and in African Diasporas communities and populations (Waldinger et. al. 1990, Fukuyama 1995).

Sixth is the matter of technology, in this case Internet and Digital Technologies and alternative renewable energy technologies. Such matters are ripe for African entrepreneurship ownership rather than merely consumerism with global eastern and western technologies elites dictating and controlling African access,
ownership, and profit-making (Stanfield 2021). The problem once again, is the colonial mindsets of many African government leaders who facilitate rather than regulate eastern/western Internet and Digital Technologies corporations and are indifferent to investing in the technologies invented by their own citizens.

Seventh is the matter of private and public sectors coming together to assist rather than systematically or intentionally hinder the developmental empowerment of vibrant environments to create, sustain, and expand entrepreneurship as vital nation-building endeavors. Private-Public initiatives are a key reason for China’s global economic success since such sector collaborations leaders understand the growing global limitations, let alone decline of government public sector financial resources, especially in impoverished western, and especially non-western, countries and thus, the need for more private sector leadership participation in and subsidizing public good projects and programs. It is an immense imperative for African leaders, in culturally relevant ways, to design, implement, and evaluate innovative private-public sector solutions to entrepreneur creation and sustainability in Africa, with its bloated ineffectual colonial derived public sector bureaucracies in most nations and private sector leaders beginning to think and act in post- colonial and post-Cold War in not a few nations, both as outsider multinationals or indigenous locals. It is the only way to assure the entrepreneurship which drives the economies of the nations in Africa is much firmly realized, supported, is well private- public financed from the top to the bottom of nations with populations which must be more effectively mobilized and subsided, to become in greater effectiveness the sources of economic subsistence that they already are so commonly, but just need more support from private-public leaders working in unison rather than in silos proven to get us nowhere except more impoverished unemployment.

Eighth and final. Where the arms of big corporate leaders and small business entrepreneurs lock and embrace in Africa like in most geographical locations in the world is in the eroding work ethic, solid work skills, institutional commitment values, and interpersonal skills pre- X generations are negatively renowned to possess. The intrusiveness of AI in formal schooling and mass consumerism has worsened these trends since plagiarism and other forms of knowledge acquisition deception for the sake of degree presentation and boasting rituals has become a massive crisis in the massive growth of consumer models of credentials pursuits. And with this, has come the increasing unemployability of well-credentialed younger and older adults once discovered by corporate employers and by small entrepreneur consumers they lack substance in their advertised skills.

It does not have to take a genius in mathematics to do the arithmetic to understand what all this means differentially in at least in two senses for the well Advanced world and the Lesser Advanced world, the latter of which is where African nations as a whole are, including those which exaggerate their middle class status based upon western conceived quantified measures, tending to ignore their large impoverished populations and communities. First, the described digital age trends gutting out the substance of work credentials for those in corporate and entrepreneur socioeconomic development sectors has a much more devastating impact in Africa and in other regions and societies in the Less Developed world. And second, the already fragile profit margin character of small and medium sized entrepreneur businesses worldwide is even more vulnerable in African contexts due to the described digital age trends which destroy the substance of credentialization and inhibits needed effective interpersonal skills development, especially in multicultural environments.

It is like the African entrepreneurs I know with business management certificates and degrees like MBAs and higher, failing in their pursuits since though they may have the capital to invest from their savings or a bank loan, they lack the common sense of good customer service and lack marketing know-how, such as
advertising their location through traditional and social media means, being so arrogant about their credentials with ignorant magical presumptions about making quick and easy money for themselves only. The myths and missing realities of continental African entrepreneurship stems from external estern/eastern traditions and westernized/easternized government and business sector practices which squeeze out, ignore, and exclude indigenous entrepreneurs while, not unusually, violating the deserved intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples. Too often, corporate businesses on the continent mass produce and sell what local entrepreneurs should and could be doing, if they had the capital and local, national, continental, and otherwise, trade access. Instead, at best, they are at the mercy of corporate
elites, both international and local/ national which define and control markets and skim off most profit margins.

There are a few African nations where entrepreneurs, in most cases women, have the potential to flex their organized muscles to define and protect their interests in the face of indifferent governments which could become responsive when they act. The continent wide inhibitors to such actions are too often corrupt governments doing a poor job in making environments conducive for entrepreneurship such as reliable power, adequate roads, rails, and public transportation, decent currency exchange, freedom of expression, and biases in resource availability such as anti-women attitudes and traditions, tribalism, religion, and political party affiliation.
There are a few African nations which boast to have governmental, technological, and international/domestic NGO infrastructural advantages for entrepreneurship but with national governments, either with leadership disallowing freedom of expression for entrepreneurship to sustain operations and revenue generation or/ and have national corporate sectors too dominant in calling the shots in economic developmental empowerment while strangling the development of a viable

entrepreneurship environment, with access to viable local to national to continental to global trade markets.

This last point is especially tragic in African nations, with significant entrepreneurial cultures in families and local rural and urban communities which become systemically under-resourced or not resourced at all due to government service delivery indifference or/and dysfunctionalism such as systemic power outages
and/or corporate undermining.

Most importantly, bucking against the digital age gloss of entrepreneurship solely for making money for one’s own narcissistic economic prosperity is a current global edict on the African continent in desperate need of effective countering. As in the United States, with its pioneering private foundations sector derived
from the surplus capital of post-American Civil War entrepreneurs turned big corporate men and women, African entrepreneurs must start being much more encouraged through government/ corporate tax break incentives to donate a percentage of their profits to enhance the sustainable developmental empowerment
of local communities in key areas such as universal access to quality education, employment, food, health care,housing, information technologies, legal services, and media.

I say this realizing, unlike the well-documented shady ethical history of too many late 19th century, and beyond, American entrepreneurs turned corporate philanthropists, what needs to be done in Africa is to encourage a new set of Pan-African ethical standards of philanthropic giving, to assure the positive moral
motivations and conditions of giving of African entrepreneurs who as they are or when they become corporate donate their surplus wealth for public good purposes.
In conclusion, the quote introducing the context of the dire need to develop continent-wide and nation-tonation supportive entrepreneurship infrastructures, joins
the youthful and aging demographics of the African continent to sound the alarm regarding how chronically the situation is in regards to generating viable employment opportunities. Namely, to stimulate entrepreneurial spirits in government and corporate sectors’ commitment, to supporting self-creation of employment and economic care of families, communities, and larger society and world.

References

Cunningham, G. 2011.Community empowerment literacy and the “ leaky bucket.”Coody International Institute. Occasional Paper Series Number 9. March

Fukuyama,F. 1995. Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press

Gordon, E.W. 2019.Human variance: Making education assessment culturally relevant in Mauritius and in the general continent of Africa. Zoom Webinar sponsored by University of Mauritius SSR Chair of African Studies Professor John Huston Stanfield, Director of ASARPI: Advanced Study of African Renaissance Policies Ideas, Quatre Bornes, Mauritius.

Stanfield, J.H. II . 2021. Walking through the opening door: African Heritage People as fourth industrial revolution global players and owners. “ Race” and culture in casual ethnography as autoethnography & autoethnography as causal ethnography-cross-societal & societal snapshots. Reduit: University of
Mauritius Press. pp.108-121.

Ugochukwu, I. 2021. Business success depends on mindset. This study of African entrepreneurs explains why. World Forum. May 6.

Waldinger, R. , Aldrich,,H., et. 1990. Ethnic entrepreneurs: Immigrant business in industrial societies. Sage International Race and Ethnic Relations Series: Thousand Oaks, California .