Janine Kacou Diagou, founder of the non-profit organization Fondation BJKD, today calls on decision-makers in the French-speaking sub-region of Africa to become more involved in supporting young people. The future of future generations and the future of the continent are at stake...

In its article L'aventure ambigue de l'entrepreneuriat des jeunes of April 2017, La Tribune Afrique gave the floor to Moussa Mara, former Prime Minister of Mali, to take stock of the difficulties encountered by entrepreneurs, especially young people, on our continent. While the latter highlighted the actions to promote youth entrepreneurship by political leaders, which encourage the younger generations to create jobs and invest in their projects, he also stressed the need to create a "favorable environment". This also involves actions aimed at developing around young entrepreneurs a support environment, able to provide them in terms of motivation, advice and feedback. Obviously, it is difficult to undertake. Any entrepreneur who starts must face multiple obstacles, regardless of the sector or the nature of his business: difficulties in cash management as well as recruitment, failures, doubt, loneliness, lack of motivation, support or experience... These factors explain why nearly 4 out of 5 companies fail worldwide, according to commonly accepted statistics. In Africa, the usual difficulties are combined with the elements indicated above: relative socio-political and economic instability, a culture of entrepreneurship still limited, a lack of appreciation of entrepreneurial paths to the general public. Still, we have one of the highest entrepreneurship rates in the world, with 22% of the working-age population choosing to start a business compared to 11.8% in the United States and 5.3% in China – the world's largest and second largest economies. It should also be noted that the continent also has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world (27%), which underlines the dynamism of our mothers, daughters and sisters, economically. Obviously, it is important to observe the failure rate of young companies to fully understand the meaning of these figures. Here again, Africa, in its great diversity, is among the leaders with just over half of its start-ups failing in the first ten years of their creation (54.20% according to the non-profit organization GreenTech Capital AfricaFoundation) against 67% in the United States according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics and 90% of between them in France, according to INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Studies). These statistics reflect a certain resilience of African entrepreneurs forced to innovate if they wish to survive, as highlighted by the World Bank in a publication last March. Nevertheless, despite these rather positive prospects, entrepreneurship still frightens young people (15-34 years old) a lot – which represented only 6% of the total entrepreneurial mass in 2019. Africa's youth are the "most valuable, innovative and dynamic resource" on their continent (AfDB, 2019). It currently represents 60% of the population and is expected to reach 850 million individuals by 2050. What does this mean? That our young people will be the first to mobilize if we want to meet the target of 450 million new jobs created over the next 20 years set by the AfDB in 2017. This, in order to cope with a demographic increase that will pose a real stress on the real economy and could, otherwise, result in a massive increase in unemployment and poverty. Our young people need to find the support and resources they need to take the risks they need to turn their ideas into sustainable businesses. They must be guided, accompanied, financed and advised - especially by an older, more experienced and more successful generation. In other words, it is the responsibility of the "elders" to take part in the entrepreneurial development of their "little ones". This is the purpose of my Bénédicte Janine Kacou Diagou Foundation (BJKD) which aims to encourage youth entrepreneurship and contribute to improving employability and access to decent and stable employment for young people, by making it a point of honour to promote gender parity. Each year, we support 100 young Ivorian companies as part of our BJKD Prize for Entrepreneurship, 5 of which benefit from a more advanced partnership. This is reflected in particular in financial support ranging from 2 million to 15 million CFA francs. We also encourage political and economic leaders to get closer to the youth. This is how we invited the Director General of the Regional Stock Exchange (BRVM, the regional financial market of West Africa) Edoh Kossi Amenounve, to chair the jury of the BJKD Prize 2020 held in Abidjan, last September. Going beyond French-speaking Africa If until now, our action targeted only Côte d'Ivoire, we have decided to deploy throughout French-speaking West and Central Africa from the 2021 season, in order to support a greater number of young entrepreneurs in their projects. However, the BJKD Foundation alone cannot do everything. Francophone Africa still has few Foundations of this type, unlike Anglophone Africa which has those of successful entrepreneurs Tony Elumelu, Mo Ibrahim or Aliko Dangote. Visionary, they understood that they need young people to succeed as much as young people need them. But on the French-speaking side, the BJKD Foundation is still one of the few to act in this direction. This is why we call on all successful economic leaders and entrepreneurs in French-speaking Africa to support our action by participating in the transmission of knowledge, the cross-development of skills (capacity building) or simply by sharing their own journey with our young people. A low-cost investment with enormous potential that, very often, is more than enough to change a destiny.