Entrepreneurship

“An eight week entrepreneurship course at the University of Dar es Salaam, designed to empower and equip Tanzanian students to start their own businesses”

The Need

Tanzania is a rapidly developing nation, with an economic growth rate is near to 8%. Added to this, Dar es Salaam is the 9th fastest growing city in the world, and this influx of people causes a greater demand for jobs and services.

Therefore, youth unemployment is a large and growing problem. A large proportion of economic activity in Dar is highly informal in nature and thus there is mismatch of demand and supply for skilled jobs. There are 900,000 young Tanzanian professionals competing for 60,000 formal jobs.

But there is a lack of entrepreneurial culture among students - the Tanzanian education system does not encourage students to think creatively, even at the University level.

Therefore, creative and driven individuals are needed to develop ideas. Creating new businesses helps to boost the internal development of a city and foster local economic diversification and growth.

Our Work

CDI has established a programme for entrepreneurial-minded university students. It encourages them to address the problems they see in their communities and develop tangible and implementable solutions in response.

In 2014, CDI established an eight-week course, DAREnterprises, for 22 students at the University of Dar es Salaam, one of the top universities in Tanzania:

The course aims to equip students with the relevant business, social and personal skills to succeed as entrepreneurs.
It aims to tackle some of the problems facing Tanzania across three areas: Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH), Manufacturing & Urban Living, and Off-grid Energy.
It ended with a sold-out conference, bringing our students together with industry experts and other innovators, who all share the vision of using ‘impactful innovation’ to improve Dar.
The five businesses formed during the programme had the opportunity to pitch to an audience of 170 people.

This conference was developed, and in 2016 was established as DARE to Change DAR:

It offered a range of events: student business pitches, expert panel discussions, guest speakers, audience-interactive activities, networking.
The theme of ‘Impactful Innovation' acted as a constant reminder of the importance of seeking sustainability, improvement and creativity in all actions one may undertake to change Dar.
The students pitched their businesses to experienced judges and a wider audience of over 400 people.
Seed is was a large part of the conference's aim, and so out of the eight businesses that went through the programme, seven received some sort of financial support at this event with a minimum amount of sponsorship being about US$1,000.

Our Impact

After an 8 week course to develop and articulate the vision of our entrepreneurs, CDI hosted a conference for over 400 business leaders and local professionals. Out of the 8 businesses presented, 7 received seed capital to move forward with their enterprise. 2016 was the biggest and most successful year to date.

With over 100 applicants to the course, CDI was able to support 20 entrepreneurs in 8 different social enterprises ranging from converting cow dung to charcoal to the creation of portable toilets for communities with poor sanitation infrastructure.

For the full version of the Entrepreneurship Project's Impact Report, please see our Publications Page.

Our Vision

This year CDI are taking active steps to improve the course further. We are developing a clearer and more articulated follow-on strategy for after the course ends through incubation and similar programs, as well as increasing participant numbers and furthering our focus on social enterprise.

One of the main changes this year will be funding. In previous years, CDI has awarded financial prizes to the enterprises which the judges deemed to have the greatest potential in their respective sectors. However, this year, we are pursuing a model based directly on investment, with private companies and individuals offering to invest directly into the enterprises on our course. As an approach which better reflects real world models of finance, we hope it will further boost our sustainability. Furthermore, four out of the five businesses which did not receive seed funding from CDI at the 2016 conference were offered funding by other businesses including the National Microfinance Bank of Tanzania. We are therefore confident that our change of approach will have minimal effect of the financing of our course participants.

This is part of a general trend CDI is embracing to make the projects more locally-based and domestically-focussed in Tanzania. The goal of the project is to transition the running of the course gradually into Tanzania, with the role of the UK team diminishing overtime.