According to the African Economic Outlook (AEC), entrepreneurship is one of the areas that Africa needs to leverage on in order to curb the rate of unemployment in the region and create more job opportunities for the continent’s growing labor force and accelerate inclusive, economic growth.
Africa’s population is estimated to be 1,273,568,843 based on the latest United Nations estimates. Of this, 29 million youths joins the region’s labor force every year according to the African Development Bank but due to the slow rate of employment growth opportunities, most end up being jobless.
According to the “Global Entrepreneurship Index 2017 report”, Botswana has been ranked as the best performer in Sub-Saharan Africa in entrepreneurship with a GEI score of 34.4, and ranks as 52nd among the 137 countries analyzed in the GEI ranking. South Africa is just behind Botswana, with its own distinct set of strengths and weaknesses and at the bottom being Chad with GEI score of 7.8.
Despite the notable improvement in entrepreneurship for the above countries, most of the African countries are still lagging behind. Numerous factors can be attributed to the negative impact on the entrepreneurial spirit in Africa including; the lack of an enabling environment, funding, and mentorship programs for the upcoming entrepreneurs.
It is due to the above underlying factors that propelled serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa through Kwese to launch the biggest ever competition dubbed as the Gogettaz, the first ever of its kind in Africa. This competition is for ambitious and driven entrepreneurs looking for financial injection and exposures for their business ventures. It seeks to address the issues that face entrepreneurship in Africa and curb the rate of unemployment in the continent.
Kwese the newest TV on the block and the latest addition to the Econet Wireless group built by Strive Masiyiwa, is set to redefine TV in Africa. Kwese is premised on the concept of TV everywhere and anywhere is set to revolutionize the media industry in Africa by catering to the changing needs of today’s globally connected African viewer.
The competition, which is available at win.kwese.com has achieved the highest traction in terms of attracting public participation through social media and website voting for the various contestants who submitted their entrepreneurship proposals. There were 4,800 entries in total and out of these 12 contestants made it to the final and received combined votes which totaled to 50 million in terms of shares, retweets and votes. Additionally, the platform win.kwese.com had 74,705 users and 191,182 page views for the competition.
Additionally, the contestants’ lobbied for their votes on their social media platforms and conducted media interviews to increase their reach, build their brand and visibility and gain publicity.
Similarly, Strive Masiyiwa, through his Facebook page, also helped promote the competition. In the recent years, Strive has devoted his time to mentoring African entrepreneurs, mainly through his Facebook page. The page has a growing followership of more than 2.5 million followers. According to Facebook, Strive’s platform has the most engaged following of any business leader in the world.
One of the well-known contestant based shows such as the Tusker Project Fame, a singing competition show, which involved contestants from different countries such as Kenya, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan among other countries managed to get only 43,736 tweets per episode. For the six seasons that it ran, it garnered approximately 3,148,992 tweets in engagement.
According to the Internet World Stats, Africa is estimated to have 388,376,491 in June with a 31.2 penetration representing 10% of the world’s internet users. Further, Nigeria has 91.6 million internet users while Kenya follows closely at 43.33 million internet users according to the Statistics portal.
The Gogettaz competition offers an investment prize of $200,000 to two lucky entrepreneurial ventures from anywhere in the world comprising of both the profit and non-profit ventures. The two lucky winners’ one male and one female, will further get a two week mentorship program by Strive Masiyiwa himself in a program known as the “Kwesé Entrepreneur Fellows”. The 12 finalists come from Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
