Nurturing Youth Entrepreneurship – The Need of the Hour

Nurturing Youth Entrepreneurship can be highly beneficial for the society, economy as well as for the progress of the nation besides the individual’s self development and achievement too.

In the current times where the nations are transitioning through tough times and adapting to globalisation, the hope for the youth lies more in becoming job creators rather than job seekers.

Promoting Youth Entrepreneurship helps solve a lot of problems in the society too by ensuring that the marginalised youth is brought to the main stream through providing them with self employment opportunities.

Most nations have recognised this fact and are providing some focus and thought into building programs conducive for Youth Entrepreneurship and providing the right environment for YE (Youth Entrepreneurship) to evolve. However nurturing YE calls for a strategic plan at national levels.

Planning to promoting YE has got to be a multi pronged strategy of building awareness, providing role models, encouraging entrepreneurial culture, introducing Entrepreneurial developmental programmes at school and college levels as well as providing for policy framework and mentorship to encourage YE and start up businesses etc.

YE building program calls for long term approach along with short term action plans too.

At a global level YEN - Youth Employment Network established up by consortium of UN, ILO & World bank works with various Governments to promote Youth Employment opportunities, promote Youth Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Building. YEN engages the various countries and their Governments by providing policy advice, help build pilot projects, imparting training and help create platforms for training the Youth.

From a Youth Entrepreneurship perspective YEN has strategically identified four areas of focus that needs to be adapted and focussed upon by all the nations. Employability, Equal opportunities for Man and Women, Entrepreneurship and Employment creation. The guideline for an implementation plan comes from addressing Employability issue and this would be the starting point of Youth Entrepreneurship building program at National level.

Strategy to develop Youth Entrepreneurship needs to first address two main areas of creating awareness and building a suitable environment as well as culture and secondly of building Entrepreneurship skill and training as a part of education at High school and University levels.

Introducing Youth Entrepreneurship awareness building program at School and college levels can ignite young minds to understand and wake up to unlimited and undreamt of possibilities that they have in becoming self employed entrepreneurs. The awareness building program should introduce them to Entrepreneurship as an option of building their carrier, provide an understanding of business opportunities, introduce concept of business, business economics, skills and abilities required for managing and growing a business, what are the personal skills and leadership qualities they need to develop to be successful entrepreneurs etc.

Once they have an idea of the opportunities that are available to them and they get a general idea of how to go about in a business environment, it is likely that the hidden potential amongst the Youth will start getting a chance to express itself and they start dreaming of becoming entrepreneurs, in which case they are likely to chart out their path for future studies that will help them equip themselves to becoming good entrepreneurs and business managers.