About GEN in Papua New Guinea

GEN began working with Papua New Guinea's entrepreneurial community in 2014 when it launched Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) in the country. GEN partnered with the Kumul Foundation, which is led by Anthony Smaré—an investor, lawyer, and ecosystem builder who chairs Nambawan Super, PNG’s largest superannuation fund. From its earliest editions, the campaign concentrated on shifting attitudes toward private enterprise in an economy long shaped by public-sector employment, planting the seeds for more than a decade of grassroots activity.

GEN and the Foundation built the GEW campaign around media advocacy and public events designed to elevate the visibility of entrepreneurship nationwide and show Papua New Guineans that starting a business is a credible career path. Each November, local founders appeared on national radio and television, including FM100 talkback programs and the NBC TV PNG Extra show, to share how they built their companies. The campaign also included workshops for students in Buka, Madang, Port Moresby, and Wewak, led by entrepreneurs at their former schools.

GEW anchored a series of larger gatherings, including the PNG Regional Business Conference, an SME Festival, and the Startup PNG Convention. The Foundation ran complementary enterprise programs such as ASPIRE—a school-based micro-entrepreneurship course launched in 2017 to introduce business skills early in a student's education. In 2018, the Foundation opened the PNG Startup Hub, the country's first co-working space, which offers access to tax, legal, finance, and business advice for early-stage founders. Additionally, Kumul GameChangers operates as a regional entrepreneurship and incubator program that identifies, trains, and accelerates founders from Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Tonga.

As the campaign grew alongside the ecosystem, GEN’s activities developed into a year-round effort. Smaré, a GEN Global Leader, leads much of the work in Papua New Guinea, raising awareness of GEN programs and connecting entrepreneurs and ecosystem leaders to the wider support network. A defining thread of GEN's work is youth entrepreneurship. Most of PNG’s population is under 30, and roughly 60,000 young people leave the school system each year—more than existing industry can absorb. To reach them, GEN’s partners developed short films profiling young PNG founders, which they distribute through the Foundation and Startup PNG channels. The films operate on the principle that emerging entrepreneurs are most easily persuaded by peers who started exactly where they are now.

GEN also connects PNG founders to its global programs. Through the Entrepreneurship World Cup (EWC)—a global pitch competition launched in 2019 that offers training, mentorship, and a share of $1 million in annual prizes—GEN and the Foundation invited local founders to compete on the world stage. Kumul GameChangers has served as a regional pipeline for that ambition. Founders including Leo Kaptigau, an agricultural social entrepreneur, credit these startup programs with reshaping how they build and test ideas.

As GEN's engagement in PNG has widened, its coalition serves as the foundation for deeper ecosystem engagement. It connects PNG founders and ecosystem leaders to GEN's global gatherings, including the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC), while working to bring more resources to founders. GEN's enduring goal in the country is to turn a young, fast-growing population toward enterprise, connecting its founders with the knowledge, networks, capital, and policy support they need to scale.