According to World Bank forecasts, Africa's working-age population is set to increase by 450 million by 2035, while the continent's economies are expected to produce just 100 million new jobs.
While the entrepreneurial spirit is omnipresent in Africa today - one African in 5 sets up his or her own business - the continent's young businesses and entrepreneurs encounter a number of obstacles in their entrepreneurial adventure, all of which hinder the development of their project and the creation of jobs: financing, support, cultural or social barriers, particularly for women, regulations and public policies that are more or less favourable to business creation, etc.
It is against this backdrop that the EU has launched the TEI IYBA Team Europe Initiative Investing in Young Businesses in Africa to support start-ups and young entrepreneurs to launch and develop sustainable, inclusive and job-creating activities.
IYBA-SEED is working to build more resilient economies and create decent jobs for young people and women, by strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems and improving access to development services for businesses in the seed and pre-seed phases.
IYBA-SEED works in partnership with 5 countries: Benin, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Togo. The team in each country deploys a tailor-made programme, with activities specific to their ecosystem, while ensuring regional consistency between the other countries involved. International cross-cutting activities are planned for this purpose.
The IYBA-SEED programme targets players in the entrepreneurial ecosystems of the partner countries: support structures, financing players, institutional partners, public agencies, innovation clusters, incubators and accelerators, academic networks, foundations and civil society players.
The key sectors concerned are the green economy, biomass, natural fibres, renewable energies, the agricultural chain, mobility, tourism and the social economy.
The programme operates in four specific areas:
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• Supporting entrepreneurship training initiatives in academic curricula and raising awareness of entrepreneurship-related career options.
• Consolidating networks of young people whose initiatives help to promote entrepreneurship.
• Capacity-building for entrepreneurship support structures and other players in the ecosystem.
• Expand access to information on entrepreneurship, including on alternative finance.
• Improving the legal framework to promote start-ups.
• Increasing the participation of young entrepreneurs' and/or women's organisations in public-private dialogue (State-private sector consultation framework).
This Team Europe initiative is funded by the EU, France, Germany and Slovakia. It is implemented by Expertise France, Enabel (Belgium), GIZ (Germany), SAIDC SlovakAid (Slovakia) and SNV (Netherlands).
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