Different players and coaches in business and entrepreneurship have advised young entrepreneurs to leverage the lessons and opportunities emerging from Covid-19 pandemic to start or enable their businesses to thrive despite the current crisis.

The tips were shared as part of Global Money Week celebrated worldwide from 22 to 28 March under the theme: "Take care of yourself, take care of your money”.

Global Money Week is an annual global awareness-raising campaign on the importance of ensuring that young people, from an early age, are financially aware, and are gradually acquiring the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours necessary to make sound financial decisions and ultimately achieve financial well-being and financial resilience.

Saving and financial wisdom

Jean Pierre Niyigena, a young entrepreneur who has ventured into educating youth about job market experience said that young entrepreneurs should have basic financial skills.

"Young entrepreneurs should know how much they generate income per month, the needs and the priorities to guide them in spending money. They should understand whatever amount of money they have can be saved and avoid unnecessary spending. Everyone should set up their own fiscal year in terms of saving,” he said.

He added that financial wisdom culture in handling money should start at such a young age.

Embracing digital skills

Niyigena advises young entrepreneurs to embrace digital skills as it has been found as an important during Covid-19 pandemic.

"The graduates who want to start business should learn about the job market and then take into account emerging technologies, try to seek digital skills and other modern skills that are needed on the market,” he said.

He urged entrepreneurs with businesses affected by the pandemic to change the plan and management.

"Young entrepreneurs should embrace E-commerce to market their products. E-commerce is now an important tool to help businesses thrive. ICT is a tool that can help entrepreneurs to search for opportunities and build a network with many people,” he said.

Tapping into available opportunities

Pascaline Niyodusenga, one of the youth coaches in business development said that there are many institutions that have availed entrepreneurship opportunities for young people. Adding seeking information and building a network is an important tool that is highly needed currently.

"Many companies have availed thrive-to-thrive programs to support small businesses. These are opportunities they should tap into. For instance, African Management Institute, Mastercard Foundation, ESPartners, Equity Bank and many others have availed programmes to support young entrepreneurs and some provide free coaching all which could help those starting businesses and those who need support to enable businesses thrive,” she said.

She urged youth to adapt in seeking information by using the internet, social media and other channels to search information about available opportunities.

She urged other youth especially those who have no access to the internet to seek help from employment centres in different sectors and cells so as to get information about different opportunities.

She requests those with opportunities to use all communication channels such as radio to even reach remote rural areas where people have no access to the internet.

Isidore Iradukunda, the Program Manager at ESPartners urged youth to also leverage opportunities in the tourism and hospitality sector.

"Financial capital is not really the main issue. You have to know the basics of learning a business in a sustainable way,” he said.

As entrepreneurs you need to look at situations like what we are facing today as an opportunity. When you look at Kigali alone the way people have worked online, online service delivery is a good opportunity, he noted.

The pandemic has entirely shaken the whole economy and therefore young entrepreneurs should take the opportunity to innovate, he said adding that tourism and hospitality is a cash flow in Rwanda that has to be bailed out.

"We have a six-month programme and young entrepreneurs with business ideas in tourism and hospitality value chain can apply. We understand what they need to run a business as an SME,”he said.

He urged entrepreneurs who want their businesses to thrive to have intelligence capital.

"We also finance those with prototypes,” added.

According to Safari Philippe, the country director of AIESEC Rwanda, a platform run by students and recent graduates of institutions of higher education, young people should seek to  adjust their respective businesses within the Covid-19 context, challenges, and opportunities.

"Covid-19 has an impact on many businesses and most of them were not ready to cope including young people. Young people should have the mind-set that problems should be business opportunities. We virtually brought together over 500 youth from across Rwanda’s institutions of higher learning to think of the opportunities. They should adopt a new normal as they strive to recover from the pandemic effects,” he said.

He advised the young entrepreneurs to improve ways of doing business by focusing on planning with different alternatives.

"They need forward thinking and young entrepreneurs should not have one plan. We should look at scenarios that provide an alternative of what to do if one thing fails. Young entrepreneurs, who wish to start a business, should come with a business idea that is well pondered. There are so many things that entrepreneurs had not thought about before and therefore they felt the pinch of Covid-19 to a high extent,” he explained