Empowering African entrepreneurs

This week, a team of Sauder School of Business students from the University of British Columbia are travelling to Africa as part of the Sauder Africa Initiative. Students from Strathmore University in Nairobi and UBC are collaborating to educate and mentor African youth through business development workshops.

Sauder Africa Initiative – Sauder School of Business, UBC from tyfn on Vimeo.

Professor Nancy Langton, who developed the initiative, says local knowledge of participating Kenyan students is integral to the success of the program. Two participating MBA student team members, Joanna Pedersen and Jonathan Kaida, tell us more about the program and why they decided to get involved.

Some excerpts:

[The Sauder Africa Initiative is] a way of bringing education to people and using some of our skills and some of our knowledge from the classroom, and some of our knowledge theoretically on the ground, to help young people and encourage them to work within their communities and work with some of the unemployment problems they face.

– Professor Nancy Langton, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Division

…I thought the setup of the program was really progressive, it was focused on education and not financing and I thought it was a great opportunity to use some of the skills that I had acquired through the program.

– Jonathan Kaida, MBA student

Jonathan Kaida, Joanna Pedersen, and Professor Nancy Langton