By Justice Mingle.
The West African Regional Coordinator of the Commonwealth Alliance of Young Entrepreneurs, Bernard Oduro Takyi, says Ghana needs more young enterprising people to build an industrialised nation that will provide sustainable jobs for the country’s rapid development.
Speaking in an interview with GBC News in Accra, Mr. Oduro Takyi who is founder of Omanbapa Ghana Limited called for investment in the youth and encouraged them to establish their own businesses instead of seeking white-collar jobs.
“Ghanaians naturally are very entrepreneurial, but entrepreneurship in our ecosystem you will need a certain framework that will propel you to do more. If you take Nigerians, they are doing better in entrepreneurship more than Ghanaians not because they are better than us, but there is a certain enabling environment where individuals believe in individuals and invest in them. No matter how great an idea is, you need to get people to invest in the idea. When you go to the UK, US, and other advanced countries with powerful economists, people just nurture dreams and ideas, and the idea in the next 10,20,50 years to come and they put money into it. Ghana is just not like that, you have a government that believes more in sloganeering, so you see one district, one factory, these things are simply to the side of people. But entrepreneurship is not a talk shop, it’s about how you work the talk and put it in place, and calculate a deliberate ecosystem to empower people. A critical assessment on the entrepreneurship ecosystem, the direct effect is not there, but if we could have a committed government that is not about slogans and wants to make things work, in the next 10 to 15years, Ghana can create thousands of millionaires. China had a policy called Con Simetrics and that policy was to simply to create 10 thousand millionaires in the next 10 years and they are achieving it so why can’t we achieve it here in Ghana. The population of Ghana is around over 30 million, we can target to create 1 million millionaires in the next 10 years and it is very doable.”
Mr. Oduro Takyi encourages prospective entrepreneurs to take the bull by the horn and persevere to achieve greater heights.
“People might be prepared to take risks but at times regardless of how daring, how determined, how persevering you are, you will need a certain ecosystem that will be very enabling to you. People want government jobs, but for me in the next 5 to 10 years to come, those jobs will be non-existent and that will create the burning desire for people to be their own bosses. And in entrepreneurship, they are going to be called the four quadrants. People must first go through a certain mental distortion and feel a certain heat, and when the heat strikes them, they can become entrepreneurs. Ghanaians are getting there. After 2,3, to 5 years, 3 to 5 years after University, you have no job and are hungry, you will discover your potential. More entrepreneurs are going to be channeled and be called accidental entrepreneurs in the next 5-10, it is because you have finished school, there is no job, so your gumption must work and that environment would not be about government support, it is going to be intuitive.”
“It will come out of people. Entrepreneurship for the fact of being in white shirt, being in a tie is about getting yourself dirty, and if you take it globally, the most successful entrepreneurs are never the people who are well educated. It doesn’t also mean that if you want to be an entrepreneur don’t go to school but identify an idea, be very determined, very persevering and you are never going to get easy entrepreneurship and that is why all over the world, few people come out as outstanding entrepreneurs because it is a very dirty area, dangerous and risk taking so let’s keep pushing. At times you can fail thousand times and one success you can have will overturn all the failures in the past,” he said.
