Welcome to the micro entrepreneur column
The stories in this new column will centre around entrepreneurs the mainstream media have no time, patience, and even the intelligence to capture. For us, their struggles with themselves, the society and her narrow, sometimes unpardonably callous business traditions and their success, however modest, will be worth our consideration.
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Even though we are not assuming that large entrepreneurs are not our business, most, and in fact 90 per cent, of our energies would be directed towards the real young persons’ start-ups. You will be coming face to face with youngsters who have heeded the counsel of experienced men and women and resisted the easy lures of gearing up and going into town seeking white colour jobs.
The rest of the year, and undoubtedly 2017, will feature young adults, male and female, who are racing against the tides of the global meltdown and its lingering rough economic consequences, as well as the sometimes ill considered local legislations that have opened our markets to predator economies such as the USA, China, India, Brazil and the European Union.
You will meet in this column young people who do not stay till late listening to unproductive, often stinking daily political discussions, or watching operas whose relevance to their lives is at best zero. Instead, you would be overawed by the bevy of young women and the group of men, some of them also fighting various physical challenges, breaking new grounds in various areas of our economy where you thought opportunities had been squandered to exhaustion.
Daring micro entrepreneurs
This new column will bring you stories from people like yourself who did not allow the stinking mantra of lack of capital to stand in the way of their determination to start their own businesses. Real as the capital unavailability for start-ups may be, countless number of people, some of them living in the same neighbourhood as yours, are finding intelligent ways of going around this resource challenge. How they are executing this feat, we believe, will interest you.
Iconoclastic grads
You will meet, in this column, persons who are going to fill you with disgusts and even set your heart on a dangerous race. The stories of university and polytechnic grads who abandoned an air-conditioned offices to take the risk of setting up a little enterprise will come to your attention,
Grads with enviable class at graduation, connections that can birth a job, parents that can feed them even if they claim not to have found a job yet, yet who have left behind all these nobilities to travel to a small community to start vegetable farming, ginger plantation, cocoa business, et cetera.
You will meet grads with diplomas in journalism who are manufacturing beads, growing mushrooms for restaurants, keeping bees and harvesting jerry cans of honey for the pharmaceutical industry, training hundreds of other young people, impacting their communities and who clearly are happier now than the position of corporate sales they had been condemned to for years.
Diverse shades of entrepreneurs
Youth in Agriculture is too general for this column; young agricpreneurs will be a better connotation for these crop of young people who are defying multiple odds to pursue their passion and become examples to the hundreds of thousands others we believe will be inspired to action by the time they read the inspiring tales of their fellow young people.
In the course of the year, we will meet truly micro entrepreneurs whose investments span only a few acres and who only have three, four or five other hands assisting them all year round and those who rear grass cutters for a stable local market, rabbits as human pets and for some soups, snails for export and vegetables, tilapia and whose successes are so phenomenal that they will turn down an average white-colour job offer.
We will meet young men in their late twenties and early thirties leading small start ups that are building huge underground tanks for the growing petroleum retail market in Ghana. We will likewise meet young engineers who did not have the time to attend the congregation and take a year group shot as souvenirs.
These micro entrepreneurs are building private roads for companies, doing architectural and structural designs for new builders and developing Apps with global appeals. When you call them engineers in self employment, you are not wrong but in this column, we will call them enginepreneurs and techpreneurs. Brace yourself for their thrilling stories.
Some young people are also in the business of ministering. While dedicated seminaries across the nation train priests for specific denominations, some individuals have set up schools that do the difficult tasks of unearthing the talent for calling.
And like the traditional universities, when the training is over, the hunt to make the flock Jesus’ begins. Some young men and women have made it their business to produce Christ, attractively package and sell him to Ghanaians and export him to other nations that are lagging behind in the knowledge of Christ.
We will bring you stories from these evangelising women of God, their works and how they hope to help a poor nation bridge the huge gap between its foreign exchange earnings and what it requires in order to bring home machineries, medicines, and even inorganic fertiliser to power its weak economy.
Young pastorpreneurs mimicking and sometimes even looking forward to outdoing giants such as Mensah Otabil and the like have already captured our attention. When we bring you their business handwriting and the strides they have made at their age, you will find reason to believe that Ghana is overflowing with talents.
Watch these out!
Every story we publish in this column, together with the countless we have published in years gone by, will be archived on our new website, www.astrategiesafrica.com. And the stories will be in much more details than in the column. When you need an idea to start a business, read the column, visit the site and talk to us. We will make available to you a mentor, a government institution, a resource centre, all of who will assist you as you take your first steps in building your own business. Welcome to the MICRO ENTREPRENEUR column.
