By Steve Agbota
Stakeholders in the Nigerian entrepreneurship space have called for the establishment of business parks to develop entrepreneurship in the country.
Speaking at the OXFAM Nigeria and the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI) incubators and accelerator meeting held recently in Lagos, stakeholders said that entrepreneurship is a call to action for young Nigerians to provide solutions to societal problems.
While addressing newsmen, Executive Director, MindtheGap Innovation Hub, Tayo Olosunde, said that looking at the evolution of Nigeria as a country, there are new problems that are emerging, which existing businesses cannot solve, saying by default it would require entrepreneurship. He added that youths need to be educated on the need to collaborate to solve societal problems.
However, Olosunde said there is need to establish business parks to create entrepreneurship opportunities and youths have to collaborate to achieve desired success in the entrepreneurship space.
Meanwhile, Partner, Passion Incubator, Olufunbi Falaji, said the essence of the stakeholders meeting was to access the impact of incubation and accelerator programmes on Nigeria’s entrepreneurship space and ensure efficiencies and effectiveness in running the programmes.
He added that, “the entrepreneurship climate in the country is looking good. Since the country experienced the recent economic recession, everybody is getting wind of entrepreneurship, understanding that it is the only way to create jobs and make businesses more efficient and effective. We are moving away from entrepreneurship being an afterthought to a deliberate action plan.”
He hinted that incubation hubs are more critical for the country at this point, saying that most of the would-be entrepreneurs lack the required skills to run a successful business.
Said he: “Incubation exposes them to the right skill set, network and other entrepreneurship soft skills. Incubation is taking you from zero to one while accelerator is taking you from one to two. Zero to one is more critical now because we have lots of talents but the pipeline is not looking good.”
On his part, , Executive Director, Wennovation Hub, Wole Odetayo said, “we need to pay more attention to youth education. The sole of any development is knowledge and I think that as a nation we are not doing enough in getting the right knowledge for our youths.”
Odetayo said that incubation hubs across the country are beginning to open up lots of opportunities which the country has begun to benefit from, stating that is has helped create hundreds of jobs over the years.