The Entrepreneurial Women of Africa

African women are born entrepreneurs; they are loaded with energy and special qualities, instinctively driven and intuitively smart toward building something of substance and real value. Risk and sacrifices they can manage hard work and raising families they can handle and small medium and large enterprises they can create and build. After all, they are the entrepreneurial women of Africa.

Imagine, if within each nation, many thousands of such talented women, united and riding on one digital platform, inter-connected, across Africa and bouncing on other global platforms, what kind of super economic force, they create? Answer lies in difficult questions; why the decade long delays to organize such groups nation-by-nation, why the unnecessary conflicts to bring all parties under one large umbrella, why the misfits of right mindsets and why lingering bureaucracies?

Time for action has arrived: Nations unable to decipher such narratives will only slide back in time… build your own mastery, systematically. Study closely, why SME is Economic Power for the African Nations and what immediate roles “Entrepreneurinas” can play in such talent vacuums and exclusive spaces across the African continent.

Facing new global-age challenges; how to make millions of African women better thinkers of business strategies, better performers on productivity, better organizers on digitization, smart managers as exporters and most of importantly global age experts to stand up to global competitiveness and high quality trading all with lightning speed. This is not easy, but done when focused and when the right desires meet the right opportunities and rewards. Other nations have gone through such build up and transition as without it little or nothing expands in economy.

So what are the rules of engagement to make Entrepreneurial Women of Africa lead a movement of high quality business minded expansion? How to optimize their talents by upskilling for exports and reskilling for better manufacturing, how to digitize to dance on global digital platforms and how to become better Founders, CEOs to manage scaled-up organizations?

Study the origin of entrepreneurialism: entrepreneurialism is a universal gift; no single nation can claim exclusivity. However, there are nations where this talent deployed as a top national priority, adapted in daily lives and created leading business culture, where this risk-taking treated as an art, respected by governments, banking institutions and the national media. When such actions and behaviorism observed as real practices and despite oddities accepted as a science to build economies and change the world in positive directions, study how the West won?

No other experiment of human endeavor has been as successful as American entrepreneurialism. Study how some 100,000 entrepreneurs carved out image supremacy of America in the last couple of centuries. Observe, how the world’s largest middle class developed and lasted over a century, notice their decline. Furthermore, open like a book, the American model of entrepreneurialism spread around the free world, however, to date, no other nation acquired national entrepreneurialism level mastery as America. Therefore, what are the hurdles, why other nations after decades are still struggling on such frontiers?

Around the world, all children born have some level of entrepreneurial skills, like a birthright, a natural gift and a special talent given to all to expand our self-development and create grassroots prosperity to go forward. Some win some lose but how?

Observe how such talents, primarily chipped away during early years, initially by parents for their deep love and their extreme reluctance to see their children stray away far outside from their traditional routines and afar from their presumed occupational paths.

Notice how such talents, often rejected even by greater family and close friends, as they too never wish to see their loved ones go far away outside prescribed spheres, and frightened of any foreign thinking and out of box risky ideas.

Finally, across daily life, the day-to-day colleagues also behave with fears of losing; in summary, such valuable talents are too often twisted, crushed and wasted. Comfort zone, do not allow to grind metal against metal and therefore lazy mentality lingers across generations.

Those who survive, often marked as out of box thinkers, black sheep, blamed for not following traditional occupational paths, rarely credited for their diverse inner strengths, hardly acknowledged for facing extremely tough times on unusual unexplainable innovative endeavors, or find this most strange, when losing all this hard work done with a smile.

There seems to be no failures for any entrepreneurial mindset, yes, as failures are only steps of the ladder of success, this is the quality of the job-creator, enterprise builder, entrepreneurial mindset. No matter how sharp and sudden the roller coaster ventures, but happily they advance in their so-called out of mind crazy entrepreneurial journey. Study the Mindset Hypotheses on Google.

Nevertheless, quietly they struggle, accept bold challenges, swim against currents and comply with strict rules and regulations but build entrepreneurial centric value creation enterprises. History, their proof, called as entrepreneurs, they win in the end. Rare ones come out as super-winners. Legends are born

Fake Entrepreneurialism: Studying some last 100 entrepreneurs and their earth shattering ideas that changed the face of our civilization is a good start. Notice entrepreneurial nations and societies and history of entrepreneurialism but most importantly the “Fake Entrepreneurialism” available on Google

Therefore, the raw and real entrepreneurialism feared by academia, as entrepreneurialism is not “explicit knowledge” like ‘accounting’ or ‘draftsmanship’, something that is written out, practiced and learned. Entrepreneurialism is “Tacit knowledge” some that cannot be written like ‘riding a bike’ or swimming’ something that a person learns through deep immersion and close engagement. Now you know you get a doctorate in economics but not in entrepreneurialism, as there are no rules and numbers or case studies to memorize. Study this deeply.

Across the world, university led major government programs largely failed to create armies of entrepreneurs. However, the same governments produced highly trained armies and superior regimented hierarchies, because these soldiers trained in the battlefields. They dug trenches in rain and slept in forest, fought real combative battles, but they never sat in classrooms drawing pictures of tanks and running around classrooms with water pistols. Education is always good, but must be free. Entrepreneurialism was born neither out of academia nor out of a classroom subject.

A massive shift towards understanding entrepreneurialism is necessary as it is a battlefield and not as a whiteboard post-it note dance. This is a war of the mindsets, take it or leave it. Study of Mindset Hypotheses on Google is essential. What will happen to an airline? Should they get Aeronautical Engineers, Frequent Flyers or only Trained Pilots in the cockpits? Which will you fly, but why?

The difficult questions: Entrepreneurial women are real business minded women; they are not under spotlight on a fashion runway, as they are on factory floors deciding production, in offices and boardrooms making difficult decisions on quality and trades. So are there, within each African nation 1K to 5K women founders, in big or small, young or old businesses, in pure trade and crafts or STEM and MBA style operations but real value generators. Are they anxious to get organized, digitized to ride digital platforms to enable them to shine locally, regionally, nationally or globally… acquire world class skills, exchange and dialogue at high level entrepreneurs and trade across the world and bring foreign exchange to home base and participate in the economy as new game players. Study Expothon on Google.

All such ideas are possible… organize Cabinet Level meetings and apply mastery of national mobilization of entrepreneurialism protocols. Engage and help local Chambers and Trade Associations, they are behind and need global age expertise. Formulate an aggressive approach and place upskilling of women entrepreneurs as number one national agenda offering constant learning for constant-change, constant-disruption all focused for constant-advancements. Deploy such powers to carve a unique global position for African women in local, regional and national leadership fronts creating local peace and grassroots prosperity. Mastery is necessary. The rest is easy

Naseem Javed a corporate philosopher, Chairman of Expothon Worldwide: a Canadian Think tank focused on “National Mobilization of Entrepreneurialism and Upskilling on Digital Platforms of Exportability” now gaining global attention. https://expothon.com

July 20 2022