Encouraging African entrepreneurship

YOU are either part of the solution or part of the problem,' it says in painted letters on a wall. 'Stay hungry, stay foolish,' says the wall opposite. An old rickshaw sits among beanbags and a vase of flowers rests on an ancient oil barrel in the corner. 'We wanted the space to feel like Google,' says Eleni Gabre-Madhin, the founder of blueMoon, a new agribusiness incubator that opened in Addis Ababa in February, without a trace of irony.Incubators and their cousins, accelerators, provide hands-on training and mentoring, and often a physical space, to help early-stage business ideas develop. In Silicon Valley they find capital for startups and take a slice of equity in return for their services. Ms Gabre-Madhin says that blueMoon draws inspiration from Y Combinator, an American accelerator founded in 2005 whose investees include Dropbox and Airbnb. The new firm's first cohort of startups will train at the office for four months, and it will give each a small cash injection in exchange for a 10% stake.That is a rarity in Africa's startup scene. A simpler and more common model is for 'tech hubs' to provide office space, some networking...Continue reading
Click here to read full news..