MOVING MOUNTAINS

Student Affairs:

Student Communities

Presented by: Otieno Nickson Otieno President, World Student Community for Sustainable

Development (WSCSD)

Architect at Technarch Consultants

Mobile: +254(0)722612841

Email: nickson.otieno@wscsd.org

Context

• Students have played a significant role in mobilizing citizens, businesses, and governments to tackle issues related to poverty, climate change, natural resource management and human rights at the grassroots.

• Student communities are stakeholders in bridging education and development gaps (rich versus poor, professional versus unprofessional, theory versus practice, developed versus developing)

• Students are interested in transforming their ideas for self-empowerment and community development into successful enterprises.

Barriers to Student-Led Entrepreneurship

• Most of the student activities remain as on-

campus initiatives that students quickly abandon as they jump out of campus to face the reality awaiting them outside.

• Many of the disenfranchised students who have initiated entrepreneurial projects are rarely recognized as legitimate practitioners of entrepreneurship.

Barriers - 2

• Entrepreneurship conventionally gives recognition only to business students, who have acquired specialized training in an institutional setting.

• Many graduates are never sure about their future career prospects by the time they live schools, leading them to venture into virtually any opportunity that matches their capacities and short-term interests.

Barriers - 3

• Some of them who landed “just any job available” out of pressure and frustration are still languishing in despair as they are unable to reconcile their childhood dreams with their current reality; to match desire, passion and productivity.

• A few of them yearning to create own businesses dare to muddle through the slow and painful process of honing their business concepts and strategies – strategic planning, sales and marketing, human resources

and finance

Beginning point

• Change to be conceived as a disruptive mind-set transforming process, starting with me and us. At the center of student communities, are passionate leaders. These are individuals that believe in the urgency to act!

• How do we identify these leaders?

• We need to think of a single student within a bigger community of students

The Shift ……..

From a world view where self, enterprise, and design are discrete silos of expertise

rather than

relationships within a system is the most important step to student engagement in

enterpreneurship.

Shift 2

• Self: Who do I need to be to achieve the outcomes I am committed to? What competence do I need? What traits or qualities do I need to embody and demonstrate? How do I cultivate this in myself?

• Relationships: What kinds of interactions will support the collaboration and synergies necessary for achieving the outcomes I am committed to? What relationships? What networks? What kinds of venues and conversations?

• Communication: How can communication be designed as a source of energy, understanding, and collaboration?

Case Studies - 1

1. Innovation for Social Enterprise/Appropriate Technology Movement

• Organizations such as Design that Matters (www.designthatmatters.org), InnoCentive (http://www2.innocentive.com) have built collaborative design processes which allow hundreds of volunteers in academia and industry to donate their skills and expertise to the creation of innovative products for communities in need.

Case Studies -2

2. Entrepreneurship Training/Investment opportunities for Students

• Social Entrepreneurship Awards and fellowship programs like the global student entrepreneurship awards (www.gsea.org), Echoing Green, Endeavor, Social Enterprise Bootcamp, http://accelerator.eonetwork.org and the Unreasonable Institute, these opportunities only admit few students

Case Studies -3

3. Student Efforts

• There are many student organizations such as AIESEC (www.aiesec.org), Oikos International (www.oikos-international.org), South American Business Forum, WSCSD have taken share the mandate to empower students as change agents and drivers of institutional change, through education, networking and research activities.

To pitch, a winning proposal for these fellowships requires coaching that is rarely available to many

students.

What Entrepreneurship Incubation/Acceleration Programs do we need?

The GREEN Approach

Grassroots: (popular, people’s, common, proletarian, blue-collar, amateur)

• An innate movement of student entrepreneurs who are building healthy communities in areas of social relevance

Entrepreneurship: (venture)

• How do we identify students with entrepreneurial mindset?

• Tackling unemployment, misemployment, under-employment faced by many graduates leaving our universities.

Evolution: (development, fruition, growth, progress, advancement)

Innovation should result in creation of:

• new products

• new production methods

• new markets

• new forms of organization

Nodes: (intersection, connection, joint, point)

• How can students, learning institutions and communities work together as authentic partners and build upon their assets, strengths, and capacities to promote the culture of entrepreneurship?

• There is need to establish multidisciplinary student organizations acting either as redistribution point or a communication endpoint for sending, receiving information on entrepreneurship.

Invisible Student Entrepreneurs

• GREEN Approach must create open community of individuals rethinking education, research, and industry to create enterprises targeting the base of the Pyramid. It must empower students with the necessary tools and resources to become successful entrepreneurs.

Conclusion

In spite of the opportunities for student engagement in entrepreneurship development many challenges, threats and barriers abound. Today, we hope to reflect on these.

Tomorrow, (Inspiration to Action) we’ll showcase entrepreneurial initiatives by students communities around the world.

I invite you to explore new possibilities for student engagement in Entrepreneurship

Actions Speak louder than words!

THANK YOU