About GEN Burundi

The Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) established its presence in Burundi through its flagship program, Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), which brought the country’s emerging entrepreneurial community into a worldwide celebration of startup activity. By 2015, the national campaign had grown to a meaningful scale, with six partner organizations delivering five activities that reached 2,450 participants across the country.  

The GEW campaign in Burundi has been anchored for much of its history by Youth Action for Development, which served as the country’s lead host organization across multiple editions of GEW between 2016 and 2022. Working through a grassroots network of local partners, Youth Action for Development used GEW to raise awareness of entrepreneurship as a pathway for Burundi’s young population — more than half of whom are under the age of 25 — and to connect Burundian founders and support organizations to GEN’s global community. 

In recent years, GEN’s engagement with Burundi has increasingly centered on policy and government participation. In 2024, Burundi joined GEN’s Startup Nations community — a network of government ministers and officials focused on designing policies and programs that help entrepreneurs start and scale — as part of a wave of new members that also included Angola, Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal and Uganda, among others.  

GEN maintains relationships with many Burundian ecosystem stakeholders, including Youth Action for Development, the Burundi Business Incubator (BBIN), and the Programme d’Autonomisation Économique et d’Emploi des Jeunes (PAEEJ), connecting these organizations and the founders they serve to GEN’s worldwide network of programs, research and expertise. 

GEN’s ongoing mission in Burundi is to connect the country’s entrepreneurs and ecosystem leaders to global knowledge, programs and communities — helping to build the networks, capacity and a policy environment that allows more Burundian founders to start, scale and contribute to the nation’s economic development.