TEACHING & LEARNING
New
Nigeria
The Man with the Golden Spreadsheet
OUTREACH
Advice
to Students: Burn a Bridge
PLUS: Watch the "Alumni Impact" video interview of Farhad Mohitl
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Mind
over Money
Private
Equity Is on a Roll, but Are Investors in for a Let-down?
New
Nigeria
Visitors
to the Wharton
Small Business Development Center come to study
entrepreneurship, leave to jumpstart Sub-Saharan economy.
When Nigeria President Olusegun Obasanjo declared that every Nigerian college student should take a class in entrepreneurship, he was recognizing a tough reality: His country's economy isn't generating enough jobs for its college graduates, so they have to fashion their own.
But he was also creating an opportunity for Peter "Banky" Bamkole, general manager of Enterprise Development Services at Nigeria's Pan-African University, and Olayinka "Yinka" David-West, EDS's academic director. Their center, in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, helps to educate aspiring entrepreneurs, putting it at the forefront of their country's economic development. The International Finance Corp., a World Bank subsidiary, selected the EDS center as a model for the delivery of entrepreneurial education in sub-Saharan Africa.
To help deepen their curriculum, Bamkole and David-West spent six weeks at the Wharton School this fall visiting at the Wharton Small Business Development Center.
"Banky and Yinka visited several business schools in the U.S. and Europe a couple of years ago," says Therese Flaherty, director of the Wharton SBDC, which is part of a Pennsylvania-wide network of business-assistance centers. Their trip was organized by the IFC's Global Business School Network, which connects leading business schools in the U.S. and Europe with their counterparts in Africa for the purpose of improving the capabilities of the African schools. "Banky and Yinka found that our philosophy was closest to theirs and, as they developed their program, they wanted feedback. We felt that the best way was for them to come spend time here."
While at Wharton, Bamkole and David-West sat in on the SBDC's entrepreneurship classes and its sessions in which student consultants, both MBA candidates and undergrads, counsel business people.
"The visit gave us a more in-depth understanding of the practices and processes of the SBDC, especially the consulting process," David-West says. "We use industry practitioners as our consultants, not students, but then we don't have the knowledge repository that the SBDC has." The Wharton SBDC's student consultants typically remain with the center for a year or two and, before they graduate, can share their knowledge with their successors. Wharton consultants are guided by SBDC experienced professionals, .
Before returning home in December, Bamkole and David-West offered their insights about Nigeria's growing, but still troubled, economy and misperceptions about their country in the West.
Mostly, they said, Americans don't appreciate Nigeria's size. Measured by population, it's the largest African country with 130 million people; one out of every six Africans is a Nigerian. Lagos, with 10 million people, is the world's 20th largest city and is growing at an average of 5 percent a year.
What's more, the Nigerian economy has lately begun to thrive. Thanks largely to its hefty oil sector—Nigeria is one of the world's largest producers—the country was able in 2006 to repay about $12 billion in foreign debt. As it has around the world, oil money has trickled down to a variety of sectors, ranging from consumer goods to telecommunications.
Over the last several years, for example, the number of telecommunications lines in Nigeria has grown more than tenfold. "Ten years ago in Nigeria, you could only get access to telecomm when you went to your office," David-West says.
The spread of telecommunications, particularly mobile phones, has helped to jumpstart the economy, she says. Previously business was conducted only in person, but now business persons can coordinate appointments via cell phone and voice mail. Westerners take for granted those sorts of conveniences, but they've enhanced Nigerian productivity.
President Obasanjo also has brought a new political stability to the country. After two terms, he's scheduled to hand over power this year to an elected successor—the first time in Nigeria's modern history that one civilian has handed power to another. Previously, military dictators often mucked about in the country's politics.
Still, problems persist. Perhaps the foremost among them is unrest in the Niger Delta, the country's oil-producing region. There, militants, who call themselves the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, have sowed chaos by kidnapping foreign oil workers and blowing up pipelines. Their beef: Little of the proceeds from the region's oil production flow to local people.
"The communities in the oil-producing regions are really, really impoverished," David-West says. "Most of the oil wealth goes to the federal government, and little of it comes back."
What's more, few oil industry jobs go to Nigerians, Bamkole points out. "Steel-fabrication people, divers and welders are all coming from outside of Nigeria," he says.
Even so, Bamkole and David-West say the unrest is limited to pockets in the delta and barely felt in Lagos or the rest of the country. "The Niger Delta isn't the entire Nigeria," Bamkole adds. "It's nowhere near Lagos." And despite the unrest, plenty of oil companies continue to drill in the delta. Chinese firms, in particular, have ramped up production in the last several years, he says.
"I attended Wharton's Africa conference a few weeks ago," he adds. "And I heard the one of the speakers say, ‘Nigeria is Africa's best-kept secret."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wharton Small Business Development Center
Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs