I N S I G H T S F R O M G H A N A , K E N YA ,
AND MOZAMBIQUE
Key Findings
Key macroeconomic trends give reason for optimism about the trajectory of private sector evelopment, while steep and widespread barriers to entrepreneurship also remain. All three case countries have been on strong growth trajectories, Ghana now ranking among the 10 fastest-growing economies in the
world. In each country, prospects for export-driven growth are significant and the growing service sector makes up roughly 50 percent of GDP. However, barriers abound. The labor market itself poses a problem, as all three countries suffer from very high youth unemployment. That in turn helps fuel the growth of necessity-driven entrepreneurship and, therefore, of the informal economy,which in Kenya accounts for 86 percent of all new jobs. This last fact might also signify an opportunity for EET, since it implies a vast population of enterprising individuals who should have much to gain from formalizing their businesses.
At the same time, both global monitoring studies and the entrepreneurs inter[1]viewed for this study report that corruption, prohibitively high taxes, and burdensome regulatory regimes remain serious impediments to business ownership.Crime and insecurity also remain a very large concern, especially for those in the informal sector. In addition to those barriers, the two impediments mentioned
most often by entrepreneurs in the study are cultural disincentives, for example discouragement by family and peers, and lack of access to finance.
The EET landscape is populated by a variety of programs designed to reach avariety of different populations, and their goals vary just as widely. EET programs often emerge as responses to key contextual challenges, a striking example being Mozambique’s national program that originally targeted demobilized soldiers when its civil war ended. Other programs target secondary students, a prime
example being Kenya’s entrepreneurship curriculum, which has been main[1]streamed in schools since the 1990s. Still other programs target higher education students, sometimes as stand-alone degree programs and in many cases targeting high-growth-potential candidates such as high-tech students. At another extreme are a large number of programs that target the most vulnerable, such as rural
women or unemployed urban youth.
With such diverse target audiences, these EET programs naturally vary in their emphasis. In all three countries, programs targeting vulnerable potential entrepreneurs often have poverty reduction as their goal rather than skill acquisition per se. Those focused on youth often make job acquisition a priority. Secondary school EET programs, by contrast, are more likely to devote energy to developing
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