By Mamadou Edrisa Njie
The International Trade Centre (ITC) report on the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in the Gambia, on 17th July, 2019, at a validation workshop that brought together service providers in the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem revealed that entrepreneurship support institutions are facing challenges in providing assistance to entrepreneurs’ in the country.
The Youth Empowerment Project (YEP) is European Union (EU) flagship project of the Republic of the Gambia implemented by the International Trade Centre in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade, Industry, Regional Integration and Employment (MoTIE) and the Ministry of Youth and Sports (MoYS), with the objectives to improve skills, create jobs and generate incomes for Gambian youth.
The YEP project has organised a validation workshop for its service providers in the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in The Gambia aimed at providing an accurate description of The Gambia’s entrepreneurship ecosystem of institutions, identifying gaps, overlaps, and eventually provide recommendations.
The report is a snapshot of the situation in 2019 and, therefore, might not be representative of past or future interactions.
The ITC is a multilateral agency which has a joint-mandate with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Through its work, the ITC contributes directly to 10 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In its Executive Summary on the entrepreneurship ecosystem, ITC revealed that the entrepreneurship support institutions are facing challenges in the way they provide assistance to entrepreneurs. Many are not able to meet the growing expectations and needs of entrepreneurs in the country.
Navigating through an ecosystem of unconnected organizations, as noted, could be complex and discouraging. In the long run, it is likely to take multiple institutions to achieve start-up success: from idea to growth to internationalization.
As indicated in the document, building skills, entrepreneurial behaviour, funding and networks are essential to start-up success and could not be provided by one institution alone.
The report further stated that the entrepreneurial ecosystems emerge as the result of a multitude of entities and actors interacting in highly complex and idiosyncratic ways.
“Implementing and accelerating entrepreneurship ecosystems is central to unleashing the potential of young entrepreneurs,” it added.
It’s been noted that the ecosystems could be studied through a variety of approaches.
Current ecosystem
The report has identified key gaps in the network of institutions providing support to entrepreneurs. The first is a poor presence of incubators and accelerator programmes. Despite having several institutions supporting entrepreneurs in various ways, only two nascent programmes, offer an incubator programme that takes entrepreneurs from idea to viable product.
Furthermore, “no accelerator programme is available to take start-ups from viable product to growth. This is limiting the resources that entrepreneurs have to develop their ideas and scale up their businesses. Linked to this, support to access international markets is limited and generic, and needs to be better coordinated within the network.
“In addition, there are poor connections to investors to facilitate access to finance.
“Compared to more advanced ecosystems, the presence of IT-focused institutions is very limited.
Pitching competitions and events are not yet playing a key role in connecting institutions and fostering collaboration among ecosystem actors”.
It has been noted also that, support in rural regions is an area of concern for most of the actors in the network, and therefore, more collaboration would be needed in the future to ensure no region is left behind. That gender-oriented programs are emerging and providing specific support and networks to female entrepreneurs.
“Nevertheless, such institutions are young and do not yet offer a comprehensive set of services. In addition, the rest of the actors in the network will need to work on targeting female entrepreneurs to ensure gender representation among their clients,” the ITC posited in the report.
Overlaps of institutions
“Overlaps are most notable in training programmes and generic entrepreneurship support. While it is positive that most institutions in the country are including entrepreneurship in their curricula, roles in the ecosystem have not been clarified.
“Therefore, most of the support offered is only able to “set the scene” for entrepreneurs to start their journey but it is not sufficiently comprehensive to guide them throughout the whole process.
“Since the majority of the institutions within the network are young, it is the more mature institutions that are leading the connections.
“In some cases, new initiatives start operating in silos, fearing competition, particularly in terms of access to donor funding and lacking information on current services already available,” the report outlined.
Another sign of the ecosystem’s immaturity, as pinpointed in the report, “is also the low number of connections between support institutions and academia”. It stated also that, universities and management schools are key to supporting entrepreneurship and to complementing or initiating incubator programmes.
Next steps for the ecosystem
The ITC report posited that for The Gambia’s ecosystem to move to the next stage, institutions would need to clarify their respective roles to facilitate the navigation of entrepreneurs within the ecosystem, and also to promote the creation of institutions that could cover the identified gaps.
“Incubators, accelerators, tech hubs and IT focused institutions are missing, or have a low presence in the ecosystem. In addition, two key services – business scale up and linkages to international markets – will need to be further structured and tailored to entrepreneurs’ needs.
“Inclusion will also need to be in the ecosystem’s agenda for growth. Reaching other regions outside the Banjul area will help the ecosystem grow and expand its maturity,” the report pointed out. In addition, the report underlined that, bringing female entrepreneurs on board would be key to ensure a rich pool of entrepreneurs with creative ideas in various domains.
Finally, it recommended that the ecosystem actors would need to embed {include} results measurement in their operations to verify the direction and quality of the services provided. This, it’s believed, would not only allow actors to refine and improve services, but also to showcase Gambian success, internationally.
On The Gambia’s entrepreneurship support ecosystem, the ITC report observed that the number of institutions supporting entrepreneurs in The Gambia is growing.
“Entrepreneurship is seen as a key area for the country’s development and it has entered the agenda of many business support organizations.
“Institutions and Gambian entrepreneurs are reacting to the need to support youth through entrepreneurship and to create an enabling environment in The Gambia for start-ups to thrive.”
While noting that other African countries such as Nigeria, Senegal or Ghana were moving fast on entrepreneurship support, the report acknowledged that The Gambia “is starting to pick up the pace to match this progress”.
It further stated of this small West African nation: “The small size of the country fosters some natural collaborations that would otherwise not take place. Collaboration is not seen as a priority, especially when competing for funds, but in some cases, it happens as a result of geographical proximity and recurring presence in events or forums.”
At the time of this report, the entrepreneurship ecosystem in The Gambia focuses in supporting entrepreneurs who are at the idea to early stage. Training on entrepreneurship and skills development is widely offered.
However, it lamented that the offering is not structured enough and presents some inefficiencies due to lack of coordination.
As indicated in the ITC’s Executive summary, both the public and private sector, with support of donor agencies, drive the initiatives. That with a clear focus on youth, gender considerations are slowly gaining presence in programmes and initiatives.
“However, gender is not yet mainstreamed, with most programme participants being male,” as per the disclosure in the ITC report.
