Vocational education and training - VET

The Cultivate Africa’s Future Fund (CultiAF) is a ten-year, CA$35 million partnership (AUD$37 million) between IDRC and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). CultiAF funds applied research aimed at improving food security, resilience, and gender equality across Eastern and Southern Africa.

In Kenya, young people aged 18 to 34 years account for 29% of the population and play an important part in the country’s economic growth and transformation agenda. However, 70-80% of youth-established businesses fail within the first two years. To support entrepreneurs to create sustainable and profitable enterprises, the United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) hosts a business training and mentorship program that also links young people to financial institutions for loans to grow or enhance their businesses.

Now in its second phase, the project was set up by the Global Agribusiness Management and Entrepreneurship (GAME) centre at USIU-Africa. It is supported by the Cultivate Africa’s Future Fund (CultiAF), a 10-year partnership between IDRC and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. The project aims to understand what combination of interventions works to ensure youth-led business success in the agriculture sector. Scaling out the approach of business training combined with mentorship and financing, this phase has attracted 1,200 applicants – up from 60 in the first phase – and has worked directly with 492 youths operating a wide range of agribusinesses.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for almost 90% of private sector employment in Canada. Entrepreneurs play a critical role not only in job creation and driving innovation and growth, but also in advancing social development and sustainability. Women entrepreneurs often face heightened barriers and have borne a disproportionate burden of the COVID-19 pandemic’s devastating impact; however, government, industry and other stakeholders worldwide are committed to advancing their success.

New research this year highlights the importance of rethinking how we assess the economic impact of SMEs generally and women entrepreneurs in particular. Additionally, there is continued evidence of broader contributions to the United Nations sustainable development goals and net-zero priorities. Canada’s unique Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES) has provided a “whole of government” approach to support diverse women entrepreneurs. The strategy focuses on three major components: access to capital; strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem; and knowledge and research, which includes the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) to provide evidence to shape policy and practice.

Formal education is correlated with entrepreneurial activity and success, but correlation does not indicate causation. Education and entrepreneurship are both influenced by other related factors. The current study estimates causal effects of formal education on entrepreneurship outcomes by instrumenting for an individual's years of schooling using cohort mean years of maternal schooling observed decades prior. We differentiate self-employment by industry employment growth and firm incorporation status. We have multiple important results. Formal schooling significantly increases the probability of self-employment in high-growth industries for both women and men. Education reduces the probability of male self-employment in shrinking industries. Education also increases incorporated self-employment for women and men and reduces unincorporated self-employment among men but not women. The overall probability of self-employment increases with education for women but is unaffected b y education for men. The results suggest that formal education enhances entrepreneurship.

The State of Women’s Entrepreneurship in Canada 2020, the first annual report from the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH), synthesizes government, academic, and expert research to highlight some of the structural barriers facing diverse women entrepreneurs in Canada. The research shows clearly that COVID-19 has amplified structural barriers, has affected women entrepreneurs more than men and has affected Indigenous, racialized and other diverse entrepreneurs most of all.

Promoting Women and Youth Financial Inclusion for Entrepreneurship and Job creation: Comparative study of selected sub-Saharan African countries