PMI foundation supports entrepreneurship

Project Management Institute Educational Foundation says it has injected a multi-million rand grant through the African Leadership Academy to support entrepreneurial training for African youths.

According to a statement, the grant expanded on PMIEF’s current partnership with the ALA, which sought to introduce students to project management through the ‘Build-in-a-Box’ curriculum.

The curriculum is a portable toolkit that provided content and teaching materials that allowed ALA student facilitators to run professional entrepreneurial leadership camps in their home countries.

The statement said the curriculum would be based on ‘BUILD’, a unique framework for teaching youth entrepreneurship to fight unemployment and engage them to lead solutions to local problems.

ALA works would work with its students to find partner organisations that they could work with to run a successful and impactful camp in their respective countries.

According to the statement, students enrolled in ALA’s flagship two-year programme had led and facilitated over 60 Build-in-Box camps for over 2,000 of their peers in cities like Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Harare, Bamenda, Kinshasa, and Port Elizabeth.

The Executive Director of PMIEF, Ashley Forsyth said, “By partnering with ALA, we have equipped over 1,700 emerging African leaders with project management skills in the recent year and are excited about continuing our relationship.

“Through ALA, we will work to transform Africa by developing a powerful network of young leaders who will work together to address Africa’s greatest challenges, achieve extraordinary social impact, and accelerate the continent’s growth trajectory.”

The Managing Director of PMI Sub Saharan Africa, George Asamani, said a country’s competitiveness starts not on the factory floor or the engineering lab, but in the classroom.

He said, “Passion, attitude, and character are one side of the enterprise coin, and having a programme that sharpens the leadership and project management skills required to become entrepreneurs definitely helps and yields better results.

“The programme is well-integrated with the industry, and PMI South Africa Chapter volunteers often provide the required support and participate with students in their projects and serve as mentors.

“The programme’s approach is well aligned to this year’s World Youth Skills Day theme – skilling teachers, trainers, and youth for a transformative future. Entrepreneurship has been a driver of global economic growth, and Africa should be no different.”

The statement added that the class of 2023 has 126 students drawn from 38 countries enrolled in the two-year diploma.

It said the ALA would combine a world-class faculty and unique instructional methods to create a robust student-centred curriculum designed to equip the youths with knowledge and inspiration to act as agents of change on the continent.