Establishing a strong Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Youth unemployment is a big challenge for many African governments. Stimulating youth-entrepreneurship by setting up entrepreneurship-development programs (EDPs) seems to be a promising way forward. For these youth-led ventures to be successful, the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) needs to be enabling and supportive. Studies have shown that a truly collaborative atmosphere, i.e. openly sharing of ideas, contacts and experience among the actors involved, will improve the wider EE. The extent to which ecosystem actors successfully collaborate depends on the mutual ‘dynamics of collaboration'. This entails the community mix, community sense, expectations, network management and ways of getting together. Youth-entrepreneurship is increasingly seen by western governments as a modern way to carry out development support. The political dimension herein is of great importance: these governments often support EDPs based on the assumption that it will result in a decreased desire to emigrate from Africa. Abuja is an arena in which youth unemployment, EDPs and high emigration flows are all existing, therefore this city was selected as the case for this research. This paper investigated two relationships. First, the relationship between the dynamics of collaboration among the stakeholders of the EE in Abuja, and the effect this has on the strength of the wider ecosystem. This has been done by conducting Q-methodology with 32 diverse stakeholders, to gain a deeper understanding of their different perspectives about collaboration dynamics. The second investigated relationship is between EDPs and youth’s desire to emigrate from Nigeria. The same participants were invited for online interviews. Five groups of stakeholders have been found, all with distinct preferences and views. They are framed as the complaining; unpleased but eager; isolated; optimistic; and autonomous stakeholders. All agree that the current EE is not enabling enough, partly due to unhelpful policy but also due to inadequate collaboration dynamics. Stakeholders agree that the community mix is unbalanced, the sense of community should increase, getting together must be facilitated more and network management must improve. Currently, the ecosystem is described to be a collection of ‘unconnected silos'. As a result, the strength of the wider EE is obstructed. Consequently, this hinders the ventures of the Nigeran youths and their personal economic perspective as well, which was found to be an important factor in the entrepreneurship-migration system as well. The findings show that EDPs do not simply lead to more desire or less desire to migrate. For some, EDPs lead to more attachment and/or income, others will be exposed to opportunities abroad, and will have gained the confidence to take the leap and migrate through EDP-involvement. Altogether, the current dynamics of collaboration in Abuja are not contributing to the establishment of a stronger entrepreneurial environment. This paper concludes that separate interventions are ineffective. Instead, a city-wide entrepreneurship strategy is needed that dictates a series of interlocking interventions.