The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 8, 9, and 12 have related objectives that are the target focus for promoting entrepreneurship, particularly for the African continent, where poverty is predominant. They prompt enhanced economic growth through created values that are collectively beneficial to all stakeholders. Their benefits include productive employment opportunities that aim at promoting inclusive industrialisation for job seekers; provision of infrastructure, poverty reduction in communities, and sensitisation of innovative schemes amongst very promising entrepreneurs. Most importantly, trained young entrepreneurs need to be engaged to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns, as they will focus on efficient usage of resources (achieving more and better results from less inputs), aimed at reducing waste and pollution, for purposes of future environmental sustainability that promote green lifestyles in the society.
In summary, the SDG12 aims at the efficient utilization of resources where businesses, consumers and the governments roundly collaborate; impacting the ecosystem, which is optimally managed for a conducive livable environment that is not hostile to man’s life.
To expect African nations to actualize the 2030 agenda for SDGs (for people and the planet to prosper and be peaceful) as adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015, governments should focus on the youths, by ensuring that they are empowered in various businesses and are properly groomed to grow in various vocations to eventually become employers of labour.
Young entrepreneurs in Africa are therefore urged to take to heart the motivational thoughts of Roy T. Bennett, (“the light in the heart”), who admonished in the following five teachings: “Never stop dreaming. Never stop believing. Never give up. Never stop trying. Never stop learning”. A growing entrepreneur should be encouraged to set high aspirations and to work hard at the same time (following government’s support on successful completing of vocational training and receiving financial empowerment) because, one needs to understand that successful outcomes from such focused, positive thinking, very promising and visionary nascent business man or woman, lay within determination. Setting ambitious targets and goals (while thinking big on a medium or long term strategic management plan), demand a well articulated and innovatively programmed business model (plan); with realistic budget for efficient business implementation.
Growing entrepreneurs for Africa’s future engagement in international trade should be expected to constantly apply skillful talents that have been practically subjected to different market situations, and at every occasion, recorded with successful outcomes in managing them under external environmental influences that usually occur from time to time.
Young African entrepreneurs in today’s world of business are subjected to diverse global economic and contemporary social issues including urbanisation, transport, climate, energy, water, science and technology, which essentially demand significant support with matching training and mentorship that foster sustainable long term growth and resilience, through networking amongst players in their respective related segments, for their targeted SDGs by 2030. The future of every society lies in the hands of a strong and dominant youth population. The 54 African nations should not joke with this, but they are expected to latch on, in developing and growing their respective young entrepreneurs for sustainable national economic efficiency (their respective GDP growth and increasing productivity).
On the issue of economic growth and climate resilience, African young entrepreneurs are expected to engage in global trade with the contemporary best practices in the running of modern international business that is compliant with the United Nations’ stipulated climate regulatory policies for global warming mitigation, and the climate adaptation strategies.
The world of today is moving very fast, and is constantly powered by scientific discoveries and fast evolving technological advancements that have migrated from the era of industrial revolution to the currently fast tracked, ever changing knowledge-based creative economy; to the trending Artificial Intelligence (AI) era, with robotic and simulated human sensory predictable actions.
This stage of technologically enhanced activities has a significant influence on the deliverables from the variables of SDG 9 objectives. The world of business therefore, will have a significant drift on the mode and manners global economic and commercial activities are operated in the near future. This will then determine the capacity building schemes and schedules of every young entrepreneur; which of course, shall influence the performance profile rating, and the extent such individuals shall go in the current global scheme of things, against global entrepreneurial development, economic growth and sustainability.
In the current ongoing actions and events in the global marketplace, AI factors in the business world should not outrun the human elements in the creative economy, based on innovative tendencies required of young entrepreneurs from every location of the globe. Otherwise, it portends a threat for humans to completely lose out given their natural right for creativity and recreation. Robotics needs to be limited to activities of infrastructural tasks because the divine phenomenon shall, somewhere along the line, be sorely violated.
Young African entrepreneurs are therefore encouraged to be focused in their vocational empowerment opportunities with every available capacity building scheme; to be able to stay trendy in their future global economic activities, judging from their very poor financial backgrounds as Africans.
Sunny Nwachukwu (Loyal Sigmite), PhD, Fellow (ICCON, CSN, SM), a pure and applied chemist with an MBA in management, is an Onitsha based industrialist, and former vice president (finance), Onitsha Chamber of Commerce. He can be reached on +234 803 318 2105 (text only) or schubltd@yahoo.com
