Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is James Wanjohi.
I’m with the... school of entrepreneurship in...
Our discussion is on highlighting the missing middle,
and basically what the discussion tries to address
is in emerging markets we realize there’s gap within the financing area in...
that addresses the missing middle
which is you can look from the company size or the finance size,
which on the left side the company size tries to address,
you know, companies that are employing between a hundred people and 250 people.
Whereas, on the other side, on the capture side,
is companies that require anything between five hundred thousand dollars
to a million dollars.
Now, what’s the real challenge here we find is that on the microfinance side
at the lower end of the pyramid,
we’ve got a lot of finance that addresses that area
and on the large corporation side, there’s a lot of banks and private equities.
However, the missing middle where the small medium enterprises
are there’s a lack of financing
and we really are facing challenges in the emerging markets.
Now, this sort of... defined a food chain to define,
you know, why is it that we’re having a challenge with the missing middle?
The microfinance basically addresses companies that hire one or two people.
At the very top... bottom, we have big companies
that, you know, hire many people.
However, at the middle we don’t have companies in emerging markets
that have the size and quantum to create jobs and create opportunities.
Now, why is the missing middle important?
We see that as the space that, you know, creates jobs, you know, promotes wealth,
and you know, sort of addresses the biggest issues
around wealth creation and enterprise growth.
Now, around the block, we’ve got issues that we’ve seen around...
micro issues that, you know, create challenges
around developing the missing middle and micro issues.
On the SME side, you know, we’ve got SMEs who are not trained,
who don’t have the skill, who don’t have access to finance,
who, on the other side, you know, we realize that we might also have some SMEs
that are running but don’t have or are not being showcased well enough
to be positioned as the next businesses for growth.
So as this initiative, what we’ve come across together is decide to focus on that area,
especially at this time when we’re having financial crisis
to see whether, as a collective of young global leaders,
we actually can come up with ideas of either creating SME funds that support SMEs
or creating, you know, a collective people who have SME knowledge
that can come in to give SME support
and help develop the next generation of successful middle sized entrepreneurs.
We walk you with institutions like Endeavor, who’ve already...
who are already in that space
who are showcasing entrepreneurs who are high input
and showing the successes of actually developing small medium entities
to priming them for bigger investments
and creating them to become the next industry giants.
So together, as a collective with the other YGLs from Africa,
we’re hoping that we can all come together putting our knowledge,
see how we can leverage the power and knowledge
of being part of the World Economic Forum
to help grow entrepreneurs in emerging markets.
Some of the things we realize that are important, mentorship is very important.
It’s very important to get people who are already in successful businesses
to mentor young and smaller businesses to enable the financial growth over time.
So to collectively, as a YGL group for the emerging markets,
we’re hoping that we can pull together, walk together,
bring all our expertise, our knowledge around financial markets,
and to provide development all the issues around supporting entrepreneurs.
And one of the questions that we asked ourselves,
had we got people like Bill Gates or Bill Clinton born in Africa,
would they have been successful as they are?
And the answer has been no.
So what can we do as young global leaders to help change this space?
Thank you.