SDA Bocconi Supports African Businesses: A Free Training Program for 20 Startups

THE SDA BOCCONI FOR GROWTH INITIATIVE INCLUDES A ONE WEEK INTENSIVE PROGRAM FOR COMPANIES SELECTED FROM AMONG THE 5,000 THAT PARTICIPATED IN THE ADANSONIA PROJECT AND BENEFITED FROM A SIXWEEK FREE ONLINE COURSE

Thanks to the pro-bono initiative SDA Bocconi for Growth, which covers travel, training and accommodation expenses in Milan, 20 African entrepreneurs will be able to attend an intensive one-week entrepreneurship program at SDA Bocconi School of Management and will meet European venture capitalists, who will help them to develop an effective pitch of their start-ups.
 
From Monday, 26 February, to Friday, 2 March, African entrepreneurs will attend a course coordinated by Mikkel Draebye, SDA Bocconi Professor of Entrepreneurship, while on 6, 7 and 8 March they will participate in Bocconi & Africa 2018. Forum on Entrepreneurship, a three-day conference that will culminate for them, on the afternoon of Thursday, 8 March, with “Startup Day - Special Focus on Africa”, the meeting with venture capitalists and international business angels.
 
The entrepreneurship program mirrors the training given to the startups hosted by Bocconi's incubator, Speed MI Up, although concentrated in one week, and addresses all the technical, but also psychological, problems that startuppers typically face and will focus on the lean startup methodology, which encourages to develop the startup’s life in a very experimental way, adapting hypotheses and expectations to the results of entrepreneurial experiments carried out.
 
The 20 entrepreneurs are active in a wide range of sectors, from agriculture to logistics, from telemedicine to real estate, from electric mobility to the media, up to apps that match supply and demand in sectors such as transport and car repair (CLICK HERE for details). They come from Cameroon, Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa and have been selected among the 5,000 African entrepreneurs already beneficiaries of the Adansonia project, managed by Bocconi professor Fernando Vega-Redondo.
 
Thanks to Adansonia, a training and research project aimed at establishing the effectiveness of networking tools, 5,000 African entrepreneurs have already taken advantage of a six-week online course and have been provided with useful tools for networking with other African entrepreneurs. A commission made up of African and European professionals selected the best business plans, whose entrepreneurs were invited to the entrepreneurship program and to the meeting with the investors in Milan.
 
“SDA Bocconi for Growth is the philanthropic project of SDA Bocconi School of Management that every year, since 2012, makes its knowledge and the work of professors and staff available for free to foster the growth of people, organizations and companies facing difficulties that prevent them from being able to afford the costs of education in a top-tier business school”, explains the Dean of SDA Bocconi, Giuseppe Soda. “In recent years, the initiative has benefited, among others, companies hit by earthquakes and volunteers of small non-profit organizations. Africa is tomorrow’s Continent and developing a generation of local entrepreneurs is a fundamental condition for its success. Among the many possible interventions, this is our contribution”.

Source: ViaSarfatti25