While the ex-president of the United States Barack Obama toured Africa to dig deeper into the problems of this region, the challenges local entrepreneurs face every new day remain the same. There are no opportunities for the local business to grow up stable and as a result, social entrepreneurship companies don’t get any positive results. Obama did a great speech at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi he visited during his African tour. He said about positive changes and even named an example of a social entrepreneur that worked, but in real life, there are still too many problems.
African countries still don’t see those positive changes and that level of support they expected. Moreover, the situation becomes even worse after the election of Donald Trump who is no longer interested in any of those African initiatives his predecessor had. And while there are some advantages for foreign volunteers, locals have almost no solutions for their problems. And to understand the whole picture of the situation we need to find out what is the life of local entrepreneurs.
What is social enterprise in business?
Africa in Sahara area is entirely conquered by entrepreneurs with small businesses. Those people do not hire more than five people, and usually, their employees are their own family members. Generally speaking, the entire business picture in Africa is about small family businesses. Moreover, most of those companies have no registration and build some sort of a black or gray market. While some of them try to develop their business, they face lots of challenges such as instability and constant law changes, therefore they are doomed to fail sooner or later.
The local environment also has its tremendous impact on those small firms. And it is obvious that political situation is also not the best one for any business growth or successful social experiments.
Speaking about business conditions in our world perspective it is clear that Africans struggle the toughest conditions we can imagine. Both Ethiopia and Kenya have a wide list of social entrepreneurship organizations, but this fact does not change anything effectively. Corruption, political instability, lack of registrations, poor electrification, and tight access to finances are the most dangerous challenges every African entrepreneur faces at the initial stage.
And we should also mention the lack of professionals in such spheres as business and management courses. All these factors make the life of a regular businessman a nightmare. Effective training in various areas of corporate management bangs the last nail in African business coffin. And most of the best world specialists still don’t know how to help it. Usually, the main problem is about the local entrepreneurs themselves.
At the same time, recent World Bank Enterprise Surveys show that the picture is not as horrible as it may seem Those small companies with just five employees are more likely to survive this business battle than those with a large staff and huge ambitions. The region itself shows that it is still not ready to play as big as Western countries expect it to behave. Even the environment is not as bad for these firms and gives them sometimes even some advantages over their competitors. Speaking of learning the English language in Kenya, it is always a hot topic. However, there are a lot of platforms like customwriting.com where learners can always ask for academic help.
At the same time, we should be fair with ourselves and understand that those small businesses are just microscopic in comparison with their, for example, European or Asian competitors. Even those companies that managed to grow into larger companies still do not have any will to become bigger, more competent, and just start doing their business on a higher level of performance.
Conclusion
First of all, locals should look forward to better development and attract potential investors from outside Africa. They need to understand that hiring family members would not make the life of their family better but ruin their business. They should hire more competent professionals with proper skills and experience. Also, it is critical for Africans to invite experts from outside to provide them with effective training and courses. That would be the work for the successful result. Chase Bank Kenya is trying to support young people in business in their will to build a successful company and feed their country and region with taxes.