Incubating Youth-led Agribusiness in Africa

The employment crisis among young Africans is severe. The lack of formal employment opportunities is expected to be made up by the youth themselves through creation of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and many stakeholder strategies are based on this expectation. Despite the high rates of MSME creation, failure rates are also high. To improve survival/success rates, different interventions have been employed including provision of business support services including Business Incubation (BI) services which support entrepreneurial skills such as recognition and exploitation of business opportunities and business development through training, mentoring access to capital, work space and other services. Most of the research on BI is centred on the experience of Europe and USA so the impact in Africa of individual services or combinations of services on success rates is not well understood.