Bridging entrepreneurial divide between Sub-Sahara Africa & the world

Abstract

Africa seem to have taken centre stage among G20 nations with Germany championing the Marshall plan with Africa which if implemented properly, will witness a shift from donorrecipient relationship to partnership. The African Diaspora contributes annually $34 billion of remittance inflow to Sub-Sahara Africa according to World Bank; figures that outweigh foreign direct investment. Unfortunately, a tiny percentage of the remittances go into entrepreneurship considering the fact that Africa possesses wealth of entrepreneurial opportunities with a young population hence in the best interest of Sub-Sahara Africa to attract more Diaspora Direct Investment. The purpose of this thesis was therefore to examine how the entrepreneurial gap between Africa and the rest of the world could be narrowed with the encouragement of Diaspora Africans interested in entrepreneurship. To achieve that I three groups of entrepreneurs who were interviewed comprising African Diaspora entrepreneurs, Successful African entrepreneur based in Africa and Non-African entrepreneurs with interest in Africa. This exploratory qualitative thesis employed the philosophy of interpretivism in order to answer the research questions and interviewed respondents using semi-structured interviews and observations. Data obtained from 10 interviews painted that only small number of Diaspora and into any productive entrepreneurship and if Diaspora is to have any meaningful effect on Africa the mind set has to change and Governments should more to create the enabling environment and specifically incentivize Diasporas to invest. The findings are by no means exhaustive and represent portion of the under researched area of African Diaspora entrepreneurship. It is envisaged that findings may be of interests to companies, organizations, learning institutions, individuals who might be interested in collaborating, engaging or working with African Diasporas to foster entrepreneurship in Africa.