Entrepreneurship is not something that happens suddenly overnight, you don’t wake up as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is a process, a journey, an evolution and a maturation. And the very first step very often happens in the benches of school or university, namely for a student to ask himself whether or not to follow the path of entrepreneurship.
Knowing how to ask the right questions to help these students move towards the creation of a business or not, is a key skill that every teacher should have in order to be able to best support youth heading towards the job market.
But don’t worry teachers! You don’t have to know everything about the business of entrepreneurship or the agricultural value chains in question. The key to your success in this role of “mentor” is threefold:
– surround yourself with ad-hoc resource people
– transmit the essential elements for starting a business (like a business plan, search for financing, market research, etc)
– guide these young talents with high involvement and passion
A good start is to let your students look pragmatically at the start-up period of their business: there will be no income generated immediately, though investments will have to be made! So it is necessary to identify, apart from the starting capital, what the ambitious entrepreneur will live from during the launch of the company.
iCRA offers training on entrepreneurship specifically for university and vocational teachers; Making Education Work. iCRA has deployed this training in different countries such as Benin, Mali, Tunisia and Burundi. Our goal is to better prepare teachers to support students with ambitions to create their own business after graduation.
