Foundation drives job creation through skills development

Briefly tell us about Wadhwani Foundation.
The Wadhwani Foundation is a US-based foundation. Our primary mission is to help solve the global problem that exists today, unemployment and lack of high quality jobs, especially in emerging markets such as Uganda, Kenya Tanzania and India.
A lot of these emerging economies are growing rapidly in terms of their youth population. Even their college graduates are not finding high quality jobs. We started this journey to see how we can help countries like Uganda accelerate their job growth.
The proven model of adding jobs is through starting new companies, which can hire people. 70 per cent of all new jobs that are created annually, globally are done through start-ups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

Most of the large businesses grow 10 to 20 per cent but they don’t add 10 to 20 per cent more employees. Their growth through productivity increases, and they don’t add more people. And with the advent of artificial intelligence today, it is going to be less and less.

When was the foundation launched and what is its purpose?
The foundation was launched in 2000 by Dr Romesh Wadhwani. The foundation works with the primary mission of accelerating economic development in emerging economies through large-scale job creation with the presence in Asia, Africa and Latin America operating in association with governments, corporates, mentors, investors and educational institutes.
Its initiatives are driving job creation through entrepreneurship, skills development and innovation. While both the foundations are focused on the same goal and mission, the Wadhwani Charitable Foundation focuses on grant making, while the Wadhwani Operating Foundation focuses on direct programmes.

What is unique about your initiatives in Uganda?
Globally, Uganda has one of the youngest population. There are a lot more youth here than any other country in the world. The country has a lot of youth unemployment. Universities in Uganda on average release more than 40,000 graduates on to the job market and there is no enough jobs to absorb all of them. Majority stay unemployed. Cities such as Kampala, Dakar and others have screaming problems screaming for solutions, which can be solved by these graduates.
So we think that if we take our best and brightest in colleges and have them focus on solving some of these problems in turn they may create companies and in turn they may create jobs, which make it a win-win proposition for the graduates and the society they live in.

How crucial are society’s value systems in spurring entrepreneurship?
Our model has two value systems in it. One of the models is to work with college students to educate and inspire them to become job creators rather than job seekers.
Here, we are basically trying to create entrepreneurs out of the best and brightest in the country. The second initiative is to support entrepreneurs by working with those that start companies to make sure that they have not only maximum chance of success but also maximum growth because starting a company and making it succeed is a very tough job. In the Silicon Valley, 75 per cent of companies fail, which is not unique to Uganda alone. Create entrepreneurs through education and innovation and then support them through our network of mentors and investors.

Is entrepreneurship about character too, and if so, what comprises of that character?
It is like how you can equate successful entrepreneurs to successful Olympians. Thousands drive for Olympics and many don’t make it but they don’t give up. Even if 5,000 make it they can create hundreds of thousands of jobs. From my experience working with these entrepreneurs, of the hundreds that we touch may be 3 or 5 per cent go ahead and create jobs. The remaining 95 per cent when they go through an entrepreneurial program, they already have the entrepreneurial character mind set in them which pushes them to do far better even if they are employed in other companies.

Many of them work for a few years and then step out and start their own businesses or with in their employment many of them start their own side businesses with the support of the corporate structure. So the end game is irrespective of the few that create successful companies and hire massively, are those that will go in to corporates and create businesses and grow them to create jobs.

How can we address the issue of lack of mentors and access to cheaper sources of credit for the young entrepreneurs?
We have another programme for supporting entrepreneurs by creating equity investment networks for these entrepreneurs. This is mainly to address the problem of access to credit, which many businesses here in Uganda face today. In doing so, we work with high net worth investors in all these emerging economies for whom $25,000 is little money and don’t know how to find businesses to invest in. So, we identify and train them on how to spot these businesses. Silicon Valley has hundreds of angel investors who are looking to invest in many promising start ups.

What are some of the key challenges that these economies face?
I visited three universities, Makerere, Kyambogo and Busitema University and we realise that many of them are teaching business and entrepreneurship courses. But the challenge we have is lack of an education system that addresses the issues and problems that we are facing today. Today, there is a big disconnect gap between what academia is producing and what the job market requires. What happens today is students after college have to go through training in order to be able to fit in the job. That’s a lose-lose proposition because employers are not willing to train them for one year. What we need is renewal based learning and access to up to date information which is very important in building a complete graduate ready for the job market.

The entrepreneurs also have no mentor and angel investors to help them realise their dreams and visions. There is also need to strengthen skilling today as another way of empowering the youth. There are many jobs that don’t need a university degree. All they need is technical skills to enable youth to do the job; jobs like air hostesses, service and hospitality industry need skilling and if we can address this skills gap then we can be able to tackle unemployment.