5 Traits That Can Make You A Successful African Entrepreneur

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Are you wondering what do you need to become an entrepreneur? Well starting a business can be very challenging and it can be rather difficult to be a successful entrepreneur in Africa. Not only will you need to work hard on your start-up, but you will also need to have a good understanding of the industry, the market and the overall African and global economy.

How To Be A Successful Entrepreneur

To build a profitable business and to become an effective entrepreneur, you need to posses some specific skills and traits that will set you apart and keep you going even during the low times. Some people are born entrepreneurs, but for most of it needs some hard work and dedication. Hence, it is a good idea to pursue an MBA programme to acquire the necessary business skills and knowledge that will help you develop entrepreneurial traits and characteristics.

Here I am going to talk about the top 5 traits which you must possess as an aspiring African entrepreneur. Read on....

Leadership Qualities

Do you find yourself in various leadership roles in work and life? Are you employed in a management position? You need to have strong leadership traits to make it big as an entrepreneur in Africa. You must guide your team through various challenges and provide solutions so that the business goals are met effectively and within the set budget. As a leader you must have good communication skills and keep your team motivated so that the work is completed smoothly and effectively.

Passion

Being passionate about your work is a must-have quality for any aspiring entrepreneur. To become a successful businessman, one should be driven by a deeper objective than simply running a start-up. It is only your passion that will motivate you to pursue your business idea and make it a reality. If you do not have that special spark in you, then you will not be able to steer your business through various challenges and difficulties.

Self-Motivation

Do you see a glass half empty or half full? If you wish to start your own business, then it is imperative that you remain optimistic in your life. You must be highly self-motivated to face obstacles confidently and turn them into opportunities. You must work diligently and find solutions to daily problems with ease. Successful entrepreneurs need to be focussed on the overall goal and should be able to drive the business towards achieving these goals.

Identifying Weaknesses

Identifying your strengths as a leader is not enough; you also need recognise your own weaknesses as it will enable you to develop yourself and lead your business better. Understanding what you don’t know will help you develop further skills and work on your weaknesses. It will not only make you grow as a person, but also enable you to become a better entrepreneur.

Resourcefulness

As the owner of a start-up, you may not be able to access a wide range of assets and other resources to operate and expand your business. Hence, as an effective entrepreneur you must be innovative and resourceful to make the best use of whatever assets you have before you. It is also important that you know how to best use your network.

Learning Entrepreneurship

You may not be a born entrepreneur. But that does not mean you cannot develop the skills and abilities to become one. Fortunately, there are a number business education programmes available that offer to train entrepreneurs and help them develop the necessary traits and skills. Earning an MBA degree will provide to the confidence to face the challenges of the corporate world and grow your business. But pursuing a full-time MBA programme requires a lot of time and money, which can result in delaying your start-up. Moreover, the huge amounts of money spent on traditional MBA programmes can be better used as valuable assets for your business. Hence, I believe the best thing to do is pursue a Fast Track MBA programme online.

Studying an online postgraduate diploma in business programme will not only allow you to save a lot of time and money, but it will also help you acquire essential business skills leading you to fast track your MBA degree. As online programmes are highly flexible, you can work on your start-up throughout the day and focus on your studies during leisure hours as per your convenience. Moreover, you will also be able to apply your business knowledge immediately on your work and help your start-up grow faster. Going for a fast track MBA online also allows you to fast track your online business diploma to the second year of a recognised MBA degree. Your business knowledge will enable you to develop the necessary entrepreneurial traits to steer your business forward.

Being An Entrepreneur

Becoming a successful entrepreneur and building your own start-up is surely a challenging task. But by gaining the right knowledge, skills and abilities you will get the confidence and motivation to lead your team and your business towards success.

What other traits do you think an entrepreneur should possess? Feel free to add to the list or share your own list by commenting below. We would love to hear from you.

6 New IT Roles That You Must Know About

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Businesses and organisations are striving to keep up with rapid technological advancements like service management, the cloud and virtualization. As more businesses are now focussed on information management, the fast pace of the IT industry has necessitated the recruitment of skilled workers. With changing technology, companies now need to modify the knowledge, skills and job roles required to develop, design, execute and organise such advanced technologies. But the fact is most IT firms are struggling to prepare themselves and cope with the growing demands of change.

A Crisis Of Talent

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A recent study by the CEB (Corporate Executive Board) shows that around 80 per cent of information technology firms fail to offer education, coaching or training for skills and abilities they think will enhance in significance. Andrew Horne, CEB Managing Director, says companies which do not have the right plan to cope with such needs can get left behind.

Horne said “The IT talent crisis isn’t new, but there’s a considerable shift happening in the skills that are in demand. We’ve identified six major roles we see as being the ‘future of corporate IT’ that we think most, if not all, innovative companies will need going forward.”

According to CEB, CIOs must aim to fill the following 6 IT roles in order to remain relevant, competitive and economical in 2015-

Collaboration And Social Media Evangelist

IT companies will get many opportunities to collaborate with partners, customers and even internally. However, most businesses are incapable of doing it right. This role will help in understanding why and how workers collaborate. As business is getting more digitised, it will help to create an effective collaboration and social media strategy.

Horne said “They’ll need to know what tools for collaboration and social engagement are available and which will work best within their organization. There will also be a need for the talent in this role to understand how best to foster communication and collaboration among teams.”

Technology Broker

A technology broker will offer purchase advice and support in negotiations to divisions throughout the organisation. This will ensure that make sure the sound purchase decisions are taken and ensure that the existing systems is compatible with the technology.

Horne said “In the past, IT was in charge of all technology purchase decisions and developed specific vendor negotiation and purchasing skills. Now, almost every department from marketing to finance has the ability to buy apps they feel will benefit their group, but in some cases these folks are more willing than able.”

Information Insight Enabler

Most companies tend to have a wealth of statistics, reports and information. However, they are unable to use this data effectively to make strategic decisions and drive their business forward, according to Horne. He said “And information insight enabler is something of a big data role; they act as coaches, not just technologists, to help business leaders and front-line employees to derive greater insight from management reports. These folks understand the data and know best how to put it to business use,” he says.

User Experience Guru

Unimpressive user experience is one of the main reasons that business cannot adopt conventional enterprise software properly. Horne claims “A lot of legacy enterprise tech just isn’t user-friendly, and people won’t use something that’s poorly designed or complex, and that impacts productivity in a negative way.”

He adds “When it comes to productivity tools for collaboration, analytics and mobile, employees will find a more usable alternative, even if it’s not ‘approved’ or provided by IT, so a user experience guru is necessary to understand and improve the user experience and improve collaboration and productivity.”

Cloud Integration Specialist

With the growing popularity of cloud, more and more business leaders are getting their applications and software packages. However, they usually fail to take in to consider the issues related to compatibility and integration with their current systems. This can result in serious obstacles for the business operations.

Horne said “A cloud integration specialist is dedicated to navigating these coordination and integration issues as well as managing and educating purchasers and users on compatibility and on working with vendors to ask the right questions.”

End-To-End IT Service Manager

IT services need proper integration of technology, information and business to develop end-to-end IT services which will improve efficiency and flexibility. Horne added “This end-to-end services model takes everything IT does and stitches it all together – all the technology, data, support, applications, and strategy – to create flexibility, responsiveness and efficiencies.”

These managers will work in senior designations with experience in technology marketing, business engagement and service delivery. Horne said “IT-as-a-service creates an environment where IT adapts to support current practices, current business needs, incorporates new and different technologies and makes it all work seamlessly.”

The Bottom Line

There you have it....six hottest new IT roles for your organisation that you must fill successfully. Horne said “Don’t try and make these hiring decisions in a vacuum or make them exclusive to executives. Don’t hide these roles from your IT team. Engage them in figuring out what holes need to be filled, what positions they need, and also who they have currently whose skills could have additional value.”

What do you think about these IT roles? Feel free to share your own thoughts and vies with us by commenting below. We would love to hear from you.

Why We Need To Make Education Accessible For Village Children In Nigeria

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Although a lot of efforts were made, but it seems that the educational goals set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) almost 14 years earlier will not be achieved any time soon. The Nigerian federal government, which faced many obstacles in attaining the MDGs, claims that the accomplishments of these goals will remain challenging unless the material and human resources in Nigeria are utilised efficiently.

Need For Offering Quality Education

Considering various aspects related to accessing education, basic academic infrastructure, educational quality, instructional material and others, it is understandable that more efforts are required, especially in rural regions where there is a dearth of essential infrastructure and inadequate levels of awareness prevail.

Recently, the global NGO ActionAid Nigeria, in association with the non-governmental organisation Hope for the Village Child, Kaduna, visited a number of villages in Kaduna state in Nigeria for encouragement and refine exercise on the importance of providing access to children to high quality education. The focus was also how they can take part in motivating the children with disabilities and to help them access education.

Making Education Accessible For All

Back in 2000, world leaders met together and made a commitment to make qualitative education accessible for every child by the year 2015. However, now that 2015 is almost here, a number of nations, including Nigeria, are yet to achieve this goal of making education available to everyone. According to studies, it was found that around 57 million children across the globe are currently out of school; and more than 24 million children, who suffer from disabilities, are included in this figure.

The findings of the research have pushed students worldwide to voice their opinions and speak their right to quality education. Moreover the children are also aiming to remind the global leaders that all children must be able to attend classrooms in schools. This movement has made the catchphrase “Send my Friend to School” popular across Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

As an effect of this movement, Hope for the Village Child and Actionaid Nigeria became motivated to get involved in propagating and promoting quality and applicable education throughout Nigeria, especially in rural regions like Chikun, Igabi and Kajuru. The NGOs visited several villages, which included Kasuwan Magani, Panja and Ekuzeh in Kajuru local government area; Panzanto and Gwaraji in Igabi local government area; and Maraban Rido and Kujama in Chikun local government area.

Facing Challenges And Difficulties

Both the NGOs found that a number of difficulties were prevalent in most of the regions that were visited. These include lack of educators and shortage of sufficient education infrastructure. Moreover, the learners receive poor quality education and primary schools students are mostly unable to read and write. Moreover, the pupils in most schools can hardle speak in English, excluding secondary schools in Maraban Rido, Kujama and Kasuwan Magani.

It was also discovered that students in Kajuru local government sit on bare floors and most of the classrooms do not have a blackboard. Moreover many infrastructures were damaged as well. Apart from these, many other schools were visited and the scenario was almost same throughout different villages.

As of the now, the Nigerian government needs to take more severe steps to improve the state on education in the country. It is not only enough to improve our classrooms by providing necessary infrastructure and study materials, but we must make education easily accessible for all children in Nigeria.

What do you think? Share your own opinions and views by commenting below. We would love to hear from you.

How Educational Development In Nigeria Is Now Becoming A Reality

Nelson Mandela once famously said “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” I believe this why now there is a stronger need for us to focus on developing the Nigerian education system. A lot has already been said and written about the problems and challenges faced by our education system, but I think now it’s time that we concentrate on the positive efforts undertaken by the government, organisations and individuals to extend the reach of education and help our students learn.

Hence, here I am going to talk about the obvious challenges faced by the education system in Nigeria and how everyone is striving to better the scenario. Read on....

Struggling With A Polluted System

As an educationist and a researcher, I have visited various schools throughout Nigeria and have generally found the same scenario existing everywhere. Although we are generously gifted with vast natural and human resources, our education system is tormented with issues like underfunding. As a result of this, most schools are left to cope with poor infrastructure and corrupted learning environment. In my experience, I have seen schools facing a lack of adequate classrooms, laboratories, libraries, computers, projectors and other teaching aids. Moreover there is a scarcity of quality educators due to non-availability of training. In fact our schools are further haunted with various vices like child-hooliganism, cultism and examination malpractices.

Throughout my career, I have met many people who think that the disturbing decline in the goals and objectives of Nigerian school system has been mostly caused by the military intrusion into politics. Every time I open a newspaper, the headlines scream at me about corruption and bribery allegations against our educators; students involved in cult wars, rape incidents in campuses, brutal initiation of unwary students to cult groups; campus prostitution supported by public office holders and many more.

But even in this dark and murky environment, I still see a ray of hope for our education system and our learners. The Nigerian government has taken a number of steps to bring education to our grass roots. However, there is still lot more that we need to do to effectively improve the current educational structure.

Empowering Our Youths

Apart from the Nigerian government, a number of establishments have also come forward to boost our education system and provide various development opportunities to our youths. One such company is Airtel Nigeria, which has constantly invested in youth development and created a number of reliable platforms, including Catapult-a-Start-up, the One-Mic music initiative, Airtel Rising Stars, and the Adopt-a- School programme, for Nigerian youths.

Recently, Airtel launched special programme named Catapult-a-Start-up for upcoming Nigerian entrepreneurs. Segun Ogunsanya, Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director of Airtel Nigeria, explained the initiative as a solid step in enabling our youths to pursue their career dream and achieve success.

Ogunsanya said “At Airtel, we are passionate about building a community for young talented Nigerians. We know that there are thousands of young people who are blessed with the skills to develop relevant apps, but most of them do not have opportunities to showcase or develop their skills.”

He added “So through the Catapult-a-Startup programme, we will not only be able to identify the talent, but also encourage local content through this initiative...Airtel will continue to go the extra mile to empowering them to succeed in their respective endeavours.”

Earlier this year, Airtel Nigeria introduced the Airtel One Mic programme which aims to discover young and talented musicians in different campuses across the country. Moreover the organisation has also provided an excellent platform for skilled athletes in the field of football through their Airtel Rising Stars initiative. 

Thousands of skilled players, both boys and girls, are given the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and take part in regional, national and international championships. However, the biggest and most important contribution by Airtel is in the field of primary education. It has associated with the government for the long term development of primary education.

Ogunsanya said “Our Adopt-a-School programme is a robust intervention that thrives on a singular mantra: when we adopt a school, we adopt for life...Schools we have adopted will continue to benefit from us indefinitely.” He continued “Without a doubt, quality education offers children the best opportunity in life to realise their dreams and become the leaders of tomorrow. A great environment is also critical to the development of a sound mind. It is, therefore, in recognition of the importance of education and as part our Corporate Social Responsibility vision that we have committed to the adoption of public primary schools across Nigeria.”

Training For A Better Future

Just like Airtel, the Intel Corporation is also taking efforts to improve the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector and boost the Nigerian economy. Recently Intel has provided training to more than 80 undergraduates from Nigeria with the help of their Intel Galileo Board.

The 80 Nigerian students were selected from 8 universities across the nation, including-

• Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA), Ondo State
• Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria, Kaduna State
• Imo State and the University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Kwara State
• Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State
• Federal University of Science and Technology Owerri (FUTO)
• Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State
• Ekiti State University (EKSU), Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State

Wolf Witt, member of Intel Education Service Corps, explained that the Intel Corporation was dedicated towards the development of engineering and technology in colleges and universities in Nigeria. I found it interesting when Intel Nigeria Corporate Affairs Manager Babatunde Akinola requested the participants to be pioneering and innovative by discovering the various potentials and opportunities offered by the Intel Galileo Board.

He said “Galileo is a platform for you to express yourself. It can spur you to being creative and innovative. There is a wealth of resources on our platform that you can use.”

Taking The Right Step

But as the government and other organisations are trying hard to improve the overall scenario, I think our students also need to be proactive and take the right steps to accomplish their academic goals. But what can our students do at this stage if the Nigerian school system is unable to provide quality education currently?

If you are committed to earn a recognised qualification and start building your career, then I would suggest that you study for an online university degree. Being an educator myself, I was initially wary about the benefits of online learning, but as I learned more I discovered that it is perhaps the best option for Nigerian students.

Why Go Online?

The answer is simple. Online degrees are highly affordable accredited programmes that allow you to learn what you want, where you want at your own pace. This means you can study from your own home and work at the same time without emptying your bank account. You can easily avoid the corruption prevalent in our higher education by studying online as you will not be required to physically visit the campus. Moreover, when you acquire university degree online, you will get excellent job opportunities in various fields as most employers across Nigeria now recognise and accept online qualifications.

I personally believe that online education can give our students the edge they need to compete with others in the global job market. As most online degrees are accredited, you will receive high quality education that will bring you at par with international students.

The Bottom-Line

As we strive to better our flawed education system, we are all aware that it will take some time to get the wheels in motion. Several important steps have already been taken, but we still need to go miles. In the meantime, you should do all that you can to add value to your resume and gain the necessary skills and knowledge. And one of the best ways to do that is certainly online education.

What do you think about the current state of our education system? What more can we do to make it better? Share your thoughts and ideas with us by commenting below. We would love to hear from you.