Unlocking Africa’s Potential Through Entrepreneurship: Insights and Education Strategies for Sustainable Development
The future of Africa’s development, and the continued resilience of the global African diaspora depends profoundly on the intentional cultivation of entrepreneurship. More than the act of starting a business, entrepreneurship is a mindset: one rooted in opportunity, awareness, creativity, innovation, and the ability to generate value within any environment.
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Professor Oluwafemi Esan’s framework for Entrepreneurship Curriculum Development and his concept of Transpersonal Entrepreneurship offer a transformative way to understand and accelerate this process.
Speaking recently with Obehi Ewanfoh as a guest on the Obehi Podcast, Professor Esan presented a skills and talent-centered approach designed to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit at both individual and societal levels.
Building on his insights, this analysis explores how these educational models can be strategically applied to confront Africa’s enduring structural challenges while unlocking the immense potential of its human capital.
Make no mistakes about it. This requires a holistic view, one that considers the political, economic, religious, and cultural forces shaping the continent’s development landscape.
The Economic Imperative for Entrepreneurship in Africa
The African continent is characterized by a rapidly growing, predominantly young population. This demographic dividend presents an enormous opportunity, but also a significant challenge: providing productive employment for tens of millions of young people entering the workforce annually.
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Traditional economic models, reliant solely on attracting foreign direct investment or expanding the civil service, have proven insufficient.
Entrepreneurship is an essential engine for self-directed economic growth. It shifts the focus from passively seeking employment (being hired by an existing structure) to actively generating deployment (releasing one’s innate skills and talents into a value-creating product or service).
Economic Realities and the “Deployment” Mandate
Youth Unemployment:
According to data from the African Development Bank (AfDB), youth unemployment remains disproportionately high across many African nations, often exceeding 20% in some urban centers.
This statistic underscores the urgent need for job creators rather than merely job seekers.
Informal Economy:
A significant portion of economic activity (often over 60% of non-agricultural employment) occurs within the informal sector. While highly entrepreneurial, this sector often lacks the structure, financial access, and scalability to drive significant GDP growth.
Entrepreneurship education must equip individuals in the informal sector with the financial literacy and formalization skills necessary to transition and scale.
The GDP per Capita Link:
Professor Esan highlights the link between deployment and GDP per capita, purchasing power parity (PPP). The shift to deployment means resident producers, the entrepreneurs, are actively contributing high-value goods and services, which is the mechanism for sustainable economic development and broad-based prosperity.
The goal is not just activity, but measurable economic value creation that translates into a higher standard of living.
Our Analysis of Curriculum and Pedagogy
The proposed Key Principles of Entrepreneurship Curriculum Development, focusing on competencies, integrating theory and practice, promoting experiential learning, and fostering a holistic skillset, are perfectly aligned with the needs of the African context, provided they are contextualized for local realities.
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Contextualizing Curriculum for African Realities
| Curriculum Element | African Contextualization | Legacy & Heritage Integration |
| Opportunity Recognition | Training must focus on identifying gaps in local value chains (e.g., agribusiness, renewable energy, affordable housing) rather than relying on imported business models. | Recognize indigenous knowledge systems and traditional trading practices as a source of market insight and opportunity. |
| Financial Literacy | Focus on microfinance, cooperative banking models (Stokvels or Susu), and adapting to low-liquidity, high-risk environments. Educate on securing investment from diaspora funding networks. | Heritage of communal saving and mutual aid—translate these informal, trusted systems into formalized financial education. |
| Networking Skills | Emphasize building trust and relationships within local community and regional trading blocs (e.g., AfCFTA), using established cultural protocols for business engagement. | Leverage Ubuntu principles: relationships and community are paramount. Networking is a relational, not purely transactional, skill. |
| Resilience and Adaptability | Essential skill given high market volatility, infrastructure deficits, and regulatory uncertainty. Must include training on pivoting and operating with limited resources. | Draw inspiration from the Legacy of surviving historical and economic shocks, fostering a mindset of overcoming challenges through collective ingenuity. |
Political Structures and Curriculum Implementation
Effective curriculum implementation requires political will and institutional support.
- Institutional Reform: Governments and educational ministries must recognize entrepreneurship education not as a vocational elective, but as a core disciplinary subject integrated from primary through tertiary education.
- Expert Consultation: The Development and Implementation Process rightly calls for Expert Consultation. In an African context, this means involving not just academics, but successful local entrepreneurs from both the formal and informal sectors, traditional leaders, and diaspora investors to ensure the curriculum is relevant and culturally resonant.
- Transnational Pedagogy: Given the mobility of the African diaspora, the curriculum must be structured to be digitally accessible and transferable, leveraging online platforms to facilitate mentorship and knowledge transfer between the diaspora and the continent.
The Power of Transpersonal Entrepreneurship and African Principles
Professor Esan’s concept of Transpersonal Entrepreneurship—the creation of a product or service from an idea originating from one’s “eternal vocation, gifts, talents and discovery of the problem that every human is born to solve for humanity”, is a profound idea that deeply resonates with core African Principles. Connecting Transpersonal Theory to African Philosophy.
Purpose and Vocation:
This concept moves beyond mere profit-seeking to anchor entrepreneurial activity in a higher purpose, solving a problem for humanity. This aligns perfectly with the ethical framework of Ubuntu, often summarized as “I am because we are.”
A truly successful business, in an Ubuntu context, must uplift the community, not just the individual.
Gifts and Talents (Deployment):
The focus on discovering and releasing innate gifts and talents into a product or service (“deployment”) is a philosophical counterpoint to the colonial-era education system, which often prioritized rote learning and preparing students for civil service or foreign-owned enterprise.
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Transpersonal Entrepreneurship re-centers the individual as a source of inherent solution.
Spiritual Systems Integration:
In Africa and the diaspora, religious and spiritual systems (Indigenous faiths, Islam, Christianity, etc.) play a central role in social and political life.
An entrepreneurship model that acknowledges a transpersonal communication with the Divine or a sense of calling is more likely to be embraced and sustained by communities whose worldview often intertwines the spiritual and the material.
Analytic Insight:
Applying this model in practice means shifting the business incubation process from a purely market-driven logic to one that begins with deep, individual-level self-discovery (What is the community problem I am uniquely positioned to solve?) before moving to business plan development.
This ensures the resulting ventures are not only profitable but also socially and environmentally relevant.
The Diaspora-Continent Bridge: A Mutually Reinforcing Cycle
The global African diaspora represents a massive, often untapped resource for both the curriculum and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This include leveraging the diaspora’s legacy and skills in different ways:
Intellectual Capital:
Diaspora professionals, academics, and successful entrepreneurs possess a wealth of skills (financial engineering, specialized technology, sophisticated market access) that can enrich the curriculum and serve as high-level mentors.
This fulfills the Expert Consultation requirement with a layer of shared Heritage and commitment.
Financial Capital:
Remittances are a critical source of foreign exchange for many African countries, often far exceeding foreign aid.
By directing a portion of this flow through programs linked to the Entrepreneurship Curriculum, remittances can move from mere consumption to targeted seed capital and investment for deployment-driven ventures.
Cultural Exchange:
The curriculum serves as a powerful bridge, allowing the diaspora to connect their inherited Legacy and contemporary skills to the continent’s contemporary needs, moving beyond a simple “help” narrative to a model of mutually beneficial partnership.
This reinforces the idea that the “African problem” is a shared global challenge that the diaspora is born to help solve through their unique gifts.
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Conclusion: From Employment to Purposeful Deployment
The framework provided for Entrepreneurship Curriculum Development, underpinned by the transformative ideology of Transpersonal Entrepreneurship, offers a robust, multi-dimensional solution for African and diaspora development. By adopting this approach, educational institutions can:
- Cultivate a Mindset of Solution: Shift the primary educational goal from securing employment to initiating deployment, thereby empowering a new generation to become active problem-solvers and value-creators in their own communities.
- Integrate Theory and African Principles: Ground entrepreneurial education in experiential learning while simultaneously validating the profound wisdom of core African philosophies like Ubuntu, ensuring the ventures are not only economically viable but also ethically and culturally sustainable.
- Harness Global African Talent: Systematically connect the intellectual and financial capital of the global diaspora to the on-the-ground needs of the continent, creating a self-sustaining cycle of innovation and wealth creation.
This is what we beleive: transforming a demographic dividend into an economic reality by aligning individual talent (gifts) with communal needs (problem-solving) through a rigorous, culturally relevant educational framework.
The future of African economic growth will be written by those who are educated, encouraged, and equipped to deploy their inherent solutions.
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