Young Entrepreneurs To Benefit From $500k Fund

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

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.

The fund is aimed at giving young entrepreneurs a financial head start

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.

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