RELEVANCE
The youth of Africa is facing a depressing rate of unemployment after they graduate from both high school and tertiary education. Additionally, many young people try to access sectors like oil, law, and public administration that are already congested. According to the UN and African Development Bank, approximately 10-12 million young people leave institutions to enter the Africa workforce yet annual job creation is only 3.1 million, resulting in an average of six years before initial employment post-graduation. This pushes the urgency of more African youths getting the requisite knowledge and necessary tools to create their own jobs and change their destiny which is exactly what the program aims to do. Providing young learners with an introductory understanding of entrepreneurship can lead to greater success in their working lives.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
The Futurepreneurship program encompasses business, entrepreneurship, and economic curriculum and emphasises business content alongside providing hands-on experiences for starting, managing, and liquidating a business. The youth use innovative thinking to learn business and explore corporate career aspirations. Participants typically receive 24–45 hours of handson business development experience and are guided by mentors/volunteers, and facilitators (teachers, JA Staff, business owners, and former participants of the program) over a period of 11-16 weeks. Some key concepts developed during the program include business competition, customer service, division of labor, dividends, fixed and variable costs, shareholders and shareholder value, business liquidation, parliamentary procedures, board of directors, management structure, research and development, and pricing.
SKILLS ACQUIRED
As a result of this program, participants develop knowledge and skills in assembling products or providing services, marketing and sales, customer data gathering, consensus building, self-assessment, entrepreneurial acumen, public speaking, leadership, accountability, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, decision making, idea development, product evaluation, synthesizing and evaluating information, and the art of competition. Together, they make up a significant contribution to acquiring the competences needed for the 21st century.
PROCESS
Students start the program by selling company shares, gaining an introduction to capitalization and financing, they decide on a product or service to sell, do market research, select a management team, agree on salaries, costing and pricing, produce their product and establish sales targets, create a business plan, and run the company, keeping records, reporting back to shareholders, assessing performance regularly. At the end of the multi-week experience they have an opportunity to reflect on their experience and receive certificates of completion. They then compete domestically with other schools, with the winners going on to compete internationally at the annual Africa Company of the Year competition where several prizes will be awarded, amongst which there is the Tomorrow Foundation Future Tech Award.
IMPACT
The agreement that Tomorrow Foundation entered with JA in 2019 entailed a 3-year partnership, with one of the impact measures being to reach 550 African youth per year (150 in Cote d’Ivoire, 200 in Gabon, and 200 in Ghana) through the Futurepreneurship program and build their entrepreneurship and financial literacy skills for future success. The table below presents the progress made to complete training and close out the 2019-20 cycle, and launch the 2020-21 cycle, considering the restrictions caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic which inevitably caused a decrease of youth reached and learners completing the program. Despite that, the program still impacted 2000 young Africans as of 2021 as seen below.
