Students to benefit from entrepreneurial training - 30,000 To acquire coaching, mentoring techniques

The Africa Network of Entrepreneurs (TANOE) is building the capacities of students in the tertiary institutions on entrepreneurship to enable them to take enterprise development as a full-time career.

This is in recognition of the fact that the country is producing mostly certificated graduates who hold certificates but can hardly practicalise what they study.

The network has, therefore, formed an alliance with Crystal Capital and Investments Limited to visit 100 schools in a year, during which it is anticipated that 30,000 students would have been coached and mentored.

 Students’ summit

Dubbed Students CEO Summit, the visit is a nationwide tour beginning next month in the northern part of the country, where students from the University for Development Studies (UDS) will be the first beneficiaries.

Briefing the Daily Graphic on the summit, the Chief Executive Officer of TANOE, Mr Ekow Mensah, explained that the objective of the summit was to create awareness and help the students to be able to identify what they want to do with their lives.

He said it also sought to push the agenda of entrepreneurship and the culture of saving among the students such that by the time they came out of school, they would have been fully prepared as to what they would want to be.

Mr Mensah, who has been recently named as one of Africa’s 100 Most Influential Young Entrepreneurs, explained that the summit would provide the network with an opportunity to talk to students about entrepreneurship.

Previous experience

Mr Mensah said TANOE had been working with some universities by equipping their students with entrepreneurial skills over the years and was now expanding its activities to reach out to other students in universities such as the Ashesi University College, the Regent University College and the University of Ghana.

Throwing more light on his link with the Ashesi University College, Mr Mensah said the college had an annual programme called entrepreneur class, which offered interested students the opportunity to be mentored for an entire semester on entrepreneurship, which graduated them to always convert problems to solutions and solutions to business models.

“Ashesi University College recognises what I do in entrepreneurship and so, every year, we go in as mentors and coaches to work with the class, to build ideas, lookg at the problems that exist and ideas that can solve those problems and how they scale up to businesses,” he explained.

He said the idea was to ensure that by the end of the semester, the students would have fully formed their ideas to businesses that they could scale up, adding that: “So my role is to provide mentorship, coaching and training to the students to enable them to convert problems to solutions and solutions to businesses.”

 Rationale of tour

 Mr Mensah said the network sought to impact as many tertiary students as possible and that informed the decision to embark on the nationwide tour, explaining that from the north, the next target would be Cape Coast.

He said the overall goal was to help the tertiary institutions to produce tailor-made students who, upon completion of school, would know exactly what to do with their lives instead of blaming someone for not getting employment.