Connecting and fostering collaboration amongst Youth/Women Led SME’s and Startups

In light of the fact that many startups and most SMEs fail within their first 3 years of operation due to a variety of reasons including but not limited to access to finance, lack of enabling environment,  unregulated market competition, business know-how or entrepreneurial skills and lack of partnerships culture, no solid regulatory body with policies to support youth and women-led ventures.

The multi-layered barriers faced by women and youth-led businesses are exacerbated by cultural limitations on women’s role and status in male-dominated public and private sectors.

Somali women as the primary breadwinners in the family enter into the business sector as a coping mechanism with limited education, a lack of the most basic business skills necessary to run a business and a lack of networks to learn from and share experiences. On the other hand, some of the young people who are unable to secure jobs have more opportunities to leverage their economic freedom and create jobs as they choose to start and scale new businesses. However, a large number of youth-led startups fail due to different challenges as they don't do proper market research and not consider the preexisting challenges while starting their Ventures. All these barriers hindered the growth of youth and women-led businesses and brings early failure.

Shaqodoon, Fikir Camp and Somaliland Women’s Hub set out to host a co-learning event that not only connects youth/women-led small businesses and startups but creates an atmosphere to share experiences and challenges and explore policies affecting them to help their rising startups thrive. 

This connector and the ecosystem-building entrepreneurial event will be an expo moment for the different business models created by youth and women and provides an opportunity for cross-learning, picking common challenges and pinpointing mechanisms to strengthen cohesion and developing a future network for youth/women entrepreneurs.

The event will get together between 100-150 entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs will be clustered into different tiers- tech-driven models, productive sector focusing enterprises, agriculture, energy, technology etc. and a comprehensive agenda on overarching challenges including access to finance, digitalization, market competition, policies, human resources and higher cost of operation will be walked through in a more creative and participatory fashion