Founded by Eleni Gabre-Madhin, PhD, blueMoon Ethiopia is an exciting initiative to discover, nurture, and fund exceptional agribusiness ideas among youth that are innovative, scalable, and have huge transformation potential.
By Eleni Z. Gabre-Madhin, PhD (blueMoon Ethiopia) |
In Ethiopia these days, we talk a lot about youth. In fact, we talk a lot about youth all over Africa. And rightly so. Africa has become a very young continent. Like elsewhere in Africa, 64% of Ethiopia’s population is below the age of 24. An astounding 20 million people, or nearly the population of Ghana and twice the population of Rwanda, are between 15 and 24, and 20% of these are unemployed. What has come to be known as the youth “bulge” has become an urgent priority for Ethiopia’s economic welfare, but even for Ethiopia’s social welfare.
Youth economic participation and youth entrepreneurship are key. Crazy big ideas and wild dreams are part and parcel of being young. In fact, they are the best part of being young. Young people must aspire to do great things, they must lose themselves, and find themselves in their dreams, they must fight, and sweat, and cry and shout and dance, and grow up in those big dreams. Young people must feel that the world belongs to them, that their lives can be as big as their dreams, and that the sky is literally the limit. And from those wild ambitions and crazy ideas, good things happen. New leaders emerge, new ideas are born, new solutions are found to big problems, new industries are invented, new ventures are launched, new books and films and plays are written, new companies are created that may grow to multi-billion dollar enterprises, and eventually employ tens maybe even hundreds of thousands of people. That is the stuff of crazy ideas.
And where do crazy ideas go in Ethiopia? We talk a lot about entrepreneurship, and increasingly, youth entrepreneurs, youth as job creators, youth micro and small enterprise development, and so on. And we are worried that youth must engage in agriculture and stay focused on the rural sector in order to grow our economy out of agriculture and springboard to agro-industrialization and from there to a fully fledged industrial and services based economy. This is all good. But what are we doing about this in Ethiopia today?
Read the complete story at blueMoon Ethiopia
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