Africa should invest in young entrepreneurs for economic growth, says YALDA

In 2004 some Harvard University alumni from Africa established  the Youth Alliance for Leadership and Development (YALDA), headquartered in Botswana conceived the idea of mentoring African youths  with entrepreneurial skills.  The organisation’s Regional Associate for Southern Africa and Diaspora, Sharleen Mabisa was in Nigeria for the body’s programme, spoke to Princewill Ekwujuru on its objectives. Read on.
What is  YALDA about?
It is basically a non profit international organization that was started in Harvard University in 2004 by a group of young Africans who wanted to bring about more positive news, outlook, and groom leaders on good governance. Our course is for Africa.

Over time, we have organized conferences across Africa where we trained and mentored and gave youths access where they can find sponsorship on projects. We allow them meet prominent people in Africa and hear their success stories. We believe that Africa can, and we believe that we are the lions of the world with the resources we have.
How many African youths have you assisted
In terms of membership we are over 25,000 and there are about 2,000 youths who have gone through our conference alone. We also have chapters in universities.
What is ‘Adopt an Idea’ programme all about?
When we had our conference last year in October we had Ideas lab where we took ideas from 250 youths. Some of them were just starting while others had their business running. What we did was to finetune their ideas and give them step by step processes of how to make themselves more professionals.
They presented their ideas to panelists who chose 10 best ideas and this 10 will be provided the platform to source for sponsorship from the corporate Nigeria. They will be given the opportunity to represent their ideas to the audience. One of the ideas came from a lady Odion Onavey (21) from Jos, Nigeria who developed idea on Agriculture business which is not popular among youths against many other ideas that were IT or media related.
The initiative for adopt an idea programme came from Nigeria. Nigerians who raised the initiative believed that after hearing ideas there should be a follow up and that is one of the reasons we held the even in Nigeria last month. We want to do this annually.
Right now Nigeria is the starting point for the Adopt an Idea programme which could be replicated in other countries. At the event we had different levels of tables that were sold. Hakeem Bello Osagie, the chairman of Etisalat who has supported the YALDA initiative spoke at the event.