The White House announced today that President Obama will travel to Kenya in July to hold bilateral meetings and participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), an initiative he launched in 2009.
This will be President Obama’s fourth trip to sub-Saharan Africa and first to Kenya—the birthplace of his father—during his presidency.
With just under two years left in his presidency, and criticized by many in Africa and in the African-American community that he has not done as much for Africa as could be expected of a U.S. president whose father was Kenyan, President Obama is looking to shore up his initiatives that pertain to the continent.
The annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit is one such initiative. Aimed at connecting emerging entrepreneurs with leaders from business, international organizations, and governments looking to support them, it underscores the president’s view that entrepreneurship is an important vehicle for accelerating economic growth and creating jobs. His attendance at the summit’s 2015 edition in Kenya will emphasize that view to African leaders. Hopefully, that will lead to more supportive national environments for the continent’s innovators and entrepreneurs.
This year’s edition of the GES is only the second to be held in Africa. The 2014 edition, which President Obama did not attend, took place in Marrakech, Morocco, over three days last November under the theme “Harnessing the Power of Technology for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.” More than 3,000 attended, including entrepreneurs, heads of state and senior government officials, global entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized enterprises, corporate leaders, and young entrepreneurs. An Innovation Village allowed entrepreneurs and innovators from Africa and around the world to promote their projects and share new ideas on information and communication technology, water management, alternative energy, and a host of other topics.
Africa, particularly south of the Sahara Desert, is a beehive of entrepreneurial activity, as Africans develop innovative technologies and start businesses to solve local problems. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)’s current assessment of the state of entrepreneurship globally, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of people involved in early-stage entrepreneurial activity. Zambia and Nigeria lead the rest of the world, with 40 percent of their adults either starting a business or running one for less than three and a half years.
A partnership between the UK’s London Business School and Babson College in Massachusetts, and the largest ongoing study of entrepreneurial dynamics worldwide, GEM reports that Africa also leads the world in the number of women starting businesses, with almost equal levels of male and female entrepreneurs and, in some countries, with women entrepreneurs outnumbering their male counterparts.
Nigeria and Zambia again outrank all other countries, with 40.7 percent of adult females owning a business in each of the two countries. Three other African countries took the top-five spots for female entrepreneurship: Ghana in third place with 27.9 percent of its adult females owning a business; Malawi with 27.3 percent; and Uganda with 25.1 percent.
GEM’s figures for entrepreneurship among adult females in the United States, the UK, Norway and France are 10.4 percent, 5.5 percent, Norway 3.6 percent, and 3.1 percent, respectively.
Supporting entrepreneurship is a key aspect of President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative, established in April 2014 to “equip young African leaders with the skills and connections they need to foster change in their communities and their countries.” That means providing them with training in the latest trends in business, access to seed funding and state-of-the-art spaces in which to incubate start-ups, and connections to investors, advisors, and distribution networks. The network currently counts more than 130,000 members.
Under the initiative, the U.S. African Development Foundation is offering $2.5 million in seed funding to members of the YALI Network over three years in the form of 250 small entrepreneurship grants. The grants, which kick in this year, are to support start-ups and expansion of businesses and social ventures in Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
Also in 2015, U.S. embassies in Africa are scheduled to set up appropriately equipped mobile entrepreneurship incubators in provincial cities and rural areas to train and incubate the businesses of at least 5,000 aspiring entrepreneurs from the young African leaders network.
President Obama last visited Kenya in 2006, during his term as a U.S. senator. He previously visited the country in 1987 when he was a student.
