SAfm’s Market Update with Fifi Peters hosted The Anzisha Prize Executive Director, Josh Adler who shared more on the Young Entrepreneurs Fund.
The fund is aimed at giving young entrepreneurs a financial head start to building leading African multinational enterprises and providing a passage in their entrepreneurial paths.
When asked about the qualifying criteria of the fund and who can get your money, this is what Mr Adler had to say:
“ Maybe I can take a step back first, which is to say that the Anzisha Prize is a partnership between African Leadership Academy, which is a pioneering secondary-education institution in Africa, and a number of other partners looking at leadership development. We’ve really started to want to reframe entrepreneurship as a career. How do young people move from secondary school in particular, but also (from) a tertiary education directly into entrepreneurship without getting a job first?
Josh Adler, Anzisha Prize Executive Director
There are three big parts of that work. The first is influencing young people, teenagers, to make that choice and a huge amount of work with parents and teachers (goes) to support that choice, and then finally people who need to grease the wheels of that choice – policymakers and investors. The fund that we’re talking about is part of that third bucket of work and we’re confident that if a movement around entrepreneurship as a career is created, there are about a million jobs that could be created by the entrepreneurship and education sector of a time by accelerating these transitions to very young entrepreneurship. That’s the background.
But the criteria for the fund – it’s really simple. You have to be a graduate of one of our programs at this stage. We’re not trying to create a fund for everybody. We’re trying to pioneer how these funds could work. The idea came from, well, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to negotiate evaluation and equity valuation as a teenager, but it’s a really, really difficult thing to do.”
Learn more about how to apply to the Anzisha Prize.
