By Enyichukwu Enemanna
In a bid to create an ecosystem aimed at supporting young entrepreneurs and create conducive environment for job creation, the African Development Bank (AfDB) says it has concluded arrangements with Microsoft to scale up technical and financial for youths in the continent.
This intervention is part of the bank’s Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Banks (YEIB) initiative designed to reduce youth unemployment especially with Africa’s young population expected to double in size by 2050 to 830 million, the bank said in a statement.
Microsoft would work with the bank to dramatically raise its impact in Africa through digital inclusion under the programme African Transformation Office, the statement added.
The African Development Bank Vice President for Private Sector, Infrastructure and Industrialization, Solomon Quaynor, described the partnership as an important development in the journey towards harnessing Africa’s demographic dividend and facilitating the creation of millions of jobs for young Africans by 2025.
He said, “The initiative places much-needed focus on youth entrepreneurship, which is key to achieving our ambitious employment targets.”
The partnership seeks to support the establishment of national-level institutions through a public-private collaboration model to scale technical and financial support for youth entrepreneurs and build their capacity, the statement says.
It noted that youth entrepreneurship would go a long way to solving the employment challenge in Africa, but lack of investment, affordable access to finance and quality business development services still presented significant hurdles.
“We believe much can be done to help foster youth entrepreneurship by collaborating with the African Development Bank, driving greater economic inclusion for this key segment of the population, and ultimately building a more prosperous society,” said the General Manager of Microsoft Africa Regional Cluster, Wael Elkabbany.
He added, “Already we’ve seen considerable success partnering together on initiatives such as Coding for Employment, which aims to equip millions of African youth with employable skills, ultimately creating broadscale employment.”
He said, “The initiative places much-needed focus on youth entrepreneurship, which is key to achieving our ambitious employment targets.”
The Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Bank is a unique value proposition set up by the African Development Bank that anchors and integrates efforts to develop entrepreneurship ecosystems in Africa.
Through this initiative, the bank will bring together all relevant financial and non-financial parties and partners to play their respective roles in supporting youth entrepreneurs through mentorship, coaching, knowledge and experience sharing, and more.
Collaborating with both private sectors and partners, the Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Bank will establish a funding scheme, credit guarantee scheme, and technical assistance programmes to strengthen providers of services to entrepreneurs. In terms of policy support, it will advocate to governments for the business enabling environment reforms needed to catalyse youth entrepreneurship.
Microsoft will also leverage its partner ecosystem, which covers 54 countries across the continent, to effect action on key technology solutions across four key areas. These include skilling, connectivity, small-to-medium enterprise (SME) digitization and hardware.
“We’re excited about the potential of this collaboration to magnify the work Microsoft is doing around digital inclusion in Africa. The digital economy plays an important part in giving rise to innovative new ventures that will create sustainable employment for young Africans. The more we can ensure budding young entrepreneurs are given every opportunity to participate in the digital economy, the closer we get to build a more prosperous future for everyone,” concluded Angela Kyerematen-Jimoh, Strategic Partnerships Lead, Microsoft ATO.
