The mortality rate of unsupported business startups worldwide is 80 percent during the first five years, 60 percent of which was in the first year of existence alone, hence the plea of GAINDE 2000’s Chief Executive Officer, Ibrahima Nour Eddine Diagne, for more support for such ventures which he described as an extremely important lever.
By Fatimata Kane
“The role of incubators is to support, in terms of skills, tools and also funding opportunities, those who bring ideas to develop them,” Diagne explained.
He was speaking last Friday in Dakar, on the occasion of the final of the 5th edition of the GAINDE Startup Challenge competition, whose theme was “Digital in the rural world.”
The competition held every year provides a platform for many students to showcase their talent.
Diagne stressed the need to have “a good articulation between funding, training, incubators to allow startups to fly on their own.”
According to him, “the initial failure rate is not catastrophic. On the contrary, it shows that there is a lot of optimism in entrepreneurship”.
On this basis, he indicated that “mechanisms such as incubators are useful since the means and resources made available to entrepreneurs make the first injury more bearable and serve as energy for further entrepreneurship.”
In this fifth edition of GAINDE Startup Challenge, the École supérieure de commerce de Dakar (Sup de co) won the prize and the Centre d’informatique et de gestion appliquée (CIGA) was second.
To carry out their projects, the teams from these two institutions will benefit from the technical and financial support of the General Delegation for Rapid Entrepreneurship (DER). In addition, GAINDE 2000 will support their incubation.
For the teams that finished 3rd and 4th, “we will put them in our ecosystem since they are computer literate. We will entrust them with subcontracting tasks so that they can consolidate their project during the year 2020,” Diagne concluded.
FTK/id/dng/lb/APA