Entrepreneurship 102 @ IEEE PAC & Afretech Train-the-Trainer | 2024 Johannesburg, South Africa

Photo: Participants at the IEEE Entrepreneurship Workshop in Rwanda in 2018 in Kigali, Rwanda

Ken Stauffer and Dr. Surya Raghu conducted two IEEE Entrepreneurship Workshops in Johannesburg for young scientists and engineers aspiring to become entrepreneurs. These were the last two IEEE New Initiatives Committee (IEEE NIC) funded IEEE Entrepreneurship Workshops of 2024. The other three workshops held this year were at Strathmore University in Kenya, the Higher Polytechnic Institute of Technologies and Sciences (ISPTEC) in Angola, and the University of the Witwatersrand (WITs) in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Participants came from Wits University, CMU-Africa, the University of Nairobi, Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and the University of Rwanda at the Afretech Train-the-Trainer Workshop 2024

The first, held 02 – 04 October, was a Train-the-Trainer workshop for Afretech Universities. Mastercard has invested US$20M in Afretech – to encourage research and entrepreneurship in Africa. The current Afretech Universities include Carnegie Mellon University Africa (CMU-Africa), Wits University, University of Nairobi, University of Lagos, American University of Cairo, University of Rwanda, and Al Akhawayn University in Morocco—more universities are being added.

The goal of this Train-the-Trainer workshop was to create a “force multiplier” for Africa by teaching faculty from these Afretec universities the topics, the philosophy, and the techniques we use during our IEEE Entrepreneurship Workshops. This allows many more people to be trained more rapidly.

The second workshop was at the IEEE PowerAfrica Conference (PAC 2024). It was an advanced version (Ent 102) of the normal IEEE Entrepreneurship Workshop (Ent 101). The workshop was organized jointly with IEEE Smart Villages and Wits University. Speakers included Ken Stauffer, Dr. Surya Raghu, Eleni Flack-Davison from Wits University, and Ashok Das from IEEE Smart Village.

Participants at the IEEE Entrepreneurship 102 Workshop at IEEE PAC 2024

This workshop was focused on “Governance” and “Scaling and Growth” for start-ups. All the participants had previously taken (Ent 101) either at PowerAfrica 2023 in Morrocco or at Wits University, so the workshop was by invitation only.

Since this was the first time we conducted the IEEE Entrepreneurship 102 workshop, we asked participants for feedback on-site in real time.

Overall, the verbal feedback in the room at the end of the day was very positive as were the post-event feedback survey results.

“Thank you for your invitation to this event. It was truly fruitful and great.”

The organizers were very pleased to witness the participants’ innovative spirit at work as each applied lessons learned displaying adaptive entrepreneurial solutions to their ideas and projects.