Since its inception in 2008, Global Entrepreneurship Week in Brazil has helped the country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem expand and strengthen – increasing awareness of entrepreneurship and self-employment as a viable career option.
GEW Brazil, led by Endeavor Brasil, will celebrate 10 years of unleashing ideas through the global movement this November 13-19, and are expecting to mobilize more than 1,000 partners to bring entrepreneurship to a variety of communities across the country.
“Being a part of GEW since 2008, we had the opportunity to see the movement grow and evolve in its 10 years,” said Marina Thiago, social projects manager at Endeavor Brasil. “It has been such a pleasure to be part of this since the beginning, learning by doing and from the community. GEW has been essential in promoting entrepreneurship as an opportunity for millions of people and reinforcing the importance of fostering entrepreneurship for hundreds of countries.”
Thiago and GEW Brazil team said the past decade of GEW celebrations have helped spread awareness about entrepreneurship and the benefits of a robust startup ecosystem in all types of communities.
“GEW helped us to take discussions on entrepreneurship to remote areas of the country, inspiring people to pursue their own dreams,” Thiago and the team said. “Through its events, it has enabled the instruction of millions of entrepreneurs on specific topics.”
Starting in 2008 with 168 partner organizations, in the past 10 years, Global Entrepreneurship Week has been able to reach millions of Brazilians with the help of 1,154 partners – who have organized more than 20,000 activities around the country. By GEW 2016, the widespread events have given rise to national media coverage, working to bring relevant information to millions in the country. The result, Thiago says, is that three out of four Brazilians say they want to be entrepreneurs.
“This one-week event has evolved to become a movement that acts 365 days of the year, in all 26 Brazilian states,” she said. “From planting the entrepreneurial seed back in 2008, we have grown to be a national network that focuses on local development through local entrepreneurship.”
GEW Brazil has had a lasting impact on the entrepreneurship ecosystem in the country – creating a legacy the organization and the movement is still building on today. In 2011, event leaders created a national council of nine organizations, each one focusing on a different stage of the entrepreneurial journey, which allowed GEW Brazil to have a more holistic perspective of challenges entrepreneurs face.
Just a year later, GEW Brazil organized the first local committee that helped the movement grow and expand to different regions in the country, and engage all the stakeholders of the ecosystem – from big corporations to individual entrepreneurs, including universities and local government organizations.
But it’s not just the Global Entrepreneurship Week celebrations that have flourished in the country. Brazil’s entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem has evolved into an emerging innovation hub.
“The ecosystem grew from including few investment firms – mostly foreigners looking for new opportunities in the country – to a whole ecosystem of incubators, companies, universities and government, all working by the belief in the power of change created by entrepreneurship,” Thiago said.
She also mentioned a cornerstone of GEW Brazil is also the release of the Entrepreneurial City Index, published during Global Entrepreneurship Week each year since 2014.
“We decided to transform GEW into a tool to advocate for policy change, since Brazil is one of the most difficult places in the world to do business,” she said. “[The] study evaluates the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the 32 most important cities in the country. It sheds a light on the weak and strong points of each region. The index is used as an assessment tool for public managers and supports organizations interested in economic impact in the cities, and for entrepreneurs to make more informed decisions when choosing where to start their businesses.”
Global Entrepreneurship Week in Brazil unites both entrepreneurs and local support organizations, but it has also brought the benefits of entrepreneurship as an economic development lever to the country’s attention – with a widespread impact both in awareness and in the lives of people across a large geographic area.
“The best part of GEW in Brazil is exactly how decentralized it became – we totally "lost control" of the celebration,” Thiago said. “It's amazing to see that small communities in the Amazon or big cities like Sao Paulo embrace the movement with the support of individuals and organizations – the unknown heroes of GEW.”