Empowering through entrepreneurship

                    By Bayo Ogunmupe

    An entrepreneur must have strategy, identify his partners for growth, embrace strategic planning  and be innovative in order to build a sustainable business venture. The chief executive of Slot Systems Limited, Nnamdi Ezeigbo said this recently as the Keynote Speaker at Covenant University Edustart Conference 2020 in Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria. Empowering Africa Through Entrepreneurship was the theme of the conference.

    Mr Ezeigbo, whose address was titled: Building Sustainable Ventures in Africa, said entrepreneurship means creating value for people, noting that in business people are mainly concerned about making money. According to him, Africans needed new mindsets to build sustainable businesses. To build enduring businesses, the Slot chief executive said, there must be genuine leadership, when people do business to meet human needs while tertiary institutions, industries and governments collaborate to achieve growth.

    The Slot CEO averred that he started business as an apprentice in a friend's engineering company. He said he leveraged on the Apprentice Model of entrepreneurship and that non-graduates could be trained as business owners on operational and managerial skills. In building an enduring venture, he said you must have a growth plan, organizational structure and trust capital. In franchising the business, Ezeigbo said the owner must develop a business system that can build a franchising firm by using information technology to drive the venture. The CEO said that access to capital and partnership depended on having trust capital.

    In his opening remarks, the Vice Chancellor of the University, represented by the deputy vice chancellor, Prof Akan Williams, said it was imperative that African governments and multinational development partners evolve sustainable development strategies to exploit market opportunities available on the continent. Earlier in his welcome address, the Curator of Hebron Startup Lab, and the Convener of the Edustart Conference, Dr Stephen Oluwatobi, noted that the maiden edition in 2018 focused on the future of education, while that of 2019 focused on the quality of the future teacher. He, however asserted that the new decade starting from 2020 belonged to those who imbibed entrepreneurship. More than five other facilitators who spoke on various means on job creation attended the conference.