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Growing up, Adam Morai spent his holidays at his father’s supermarket in Marondera, Zimbabwe. An early learner of the value an entrepreneur can create, he has built a series of businesses in several sectors, including tobacco, retail, agriculture, transportation and logistics, petroleum/lubricants, real estate development, mining and commodities. rice field.
Adam, who manages TRT Investments’ portfolio of operations in Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and Kenya, believes Africa lacks the “right kind” of entrepreneurs.
“So what is it that makes a largely developing continent like Africa so incapable of finding solutions to its myriad problems and monetizing them?” he said in an opinion published in 2022. asked in writing.
The answer, Molai told TechCabal, is that most African entrepreneurs are driven by need. The right type of entrepreneur, he explains, will take advantage of the opportunity instead. “You have to develop your entrepreneurial spirit from a survival level to an innovation level,” he tells TechCabal. In a continent with so many challenges, all requiring solutions and innovations that create value and capital, people are still forced to rely on selling cassava on the roadside. ”
“Can you say that’s the entrepreneurial spirit of developing Africa?” he poses.
Mollai points out that in the world’s western countries, 80% of the economy is underpinned by SMEs, which employ a higher proportion of the workforce compared to other sectors. . By comparison, Africa, with the exception of the North African countries, has a high concentration of microenterprises. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), 97% of the 44 million small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are micro enterprises.
Africa’s working-age population is expected to grow by 265.8%, compared with 28.3% for the world total. But there are not enough jobs for her 40 million young Africans who enter the job market each year. So, as Moray explains, these young people are forced to become entrepreneurs out of necessity.
Aren’t people the entrepreneurs they need because it’s the only option available?
Morai thinks this framing is problematic. “Looking back at his school days, there were his days as a doctor and a lawyer, but were there his days as an entrepreneur?” he explains.
“As long as entrepreneurship is treated as a frontier activity, as long as it is treated as an activity for people who are not accepted by the mainstream, entrepreneurship will never be what it is supposed to be. must go mainstream, it’s the entrepreneurial spirit from survivalist to major state of our economy.”
So how do we turn need-based entrepreneurship into an innovation entrepreneur?
“It’s an ecosystem,” he says. “It starts in the heart,” Moray explains, Africans were never mentally socialized to see themselves as businessmen. Instead, Africans have always been the means of production. The labor part of the equation, not the entrepreneur. He explained that Africans need to take responsibility for their journey and ask themselves, “What do we need to do collectively to start building that entrepreneurial ecosystem?” Did.
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