The Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) started on Sunday 27th and ends on Wednesday, 30th March 2022. This congress is organised annually by the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) which has programmes spread across all countries in the world. Their programmes focus on helping individual citizens start and scale their businesses. This year's theme was - Reboot. Rethink. Regenerate.
Boris Ngala - BBIncubator's founder and Hub Manager was invited by Cameroon's GEN chapter, to attend. The main purpose of his attendance is to network with entrepreneurs from around the world, provide further visibility on the international stage for the incubator and establish links for future collaborations.
The congress was qualified by a series of interactive workshops that encouraged delegates to develop a roadmap for addressing ecosystem gaps and adding value to their entrepreneurship ecosystems, solving challenges and barriers faced by entrepreneurs. The exercises were meant to capture common assumptions and myths.
There was the Startup Nations Ministerial which facilitates high-level dialogue among policy leaders and entrepreneurship policy experts about how public-sector agencies across the world can better encourage more new and young businesses to start and grow.
National authorities were invited to share knowledge with partners from multilateral institutions, and discuss how governments can support entrepreneurial innovation.
GEC also featured global brands and powerful voices along with a discussion about the outcomes from the Startup Nations Ministerial.
There were masterclasses on topics such as How to Reduce Risk Before Presenting Your Startup Idea to Investors. Workshops provided hands-on exercises that encouraged delegates to take specific practices or outputs back home. These workshops were tailored for entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs). For example Monitoring and Evaluation Best Practices for Entrepreneur-Support Programs or Building an Alternative Funding Roadmap.
There were panels where experience-sharing among speakers from different nations discussed unresolved issues such as Inclusiveness in Entrepreneurship Ecosystems or Sector Exploration.
There was a highly interactive, camp-fire type session on learning hubs to dive deeper into specific topics such as Research You Should Know, Developing Corporate-Startup Collaboration and encouraging a participatory discussion.
Apart from Q&A Sessions with Plenary Speakers and Experts, entrepreneurs and stakeholders had the exclusive opportunity to be mentored one-on-one by world-class mentors.
As part of the Cameroon delegation with the GEN Cameroon branch, Boris got an audience with the Minister of Small & Medium-Sized Entreprises, Social Economies & Handicrafts - H.E Achille Bassilekin III, on Tuesday 22nd March 2022. He worked with the GEN team in tandem with the Ministry of SMEs, Social Economies & Handicrafts, to create a magazine highlighting the delegates and start-ups attending from Cameroon. We are glad to see that the incubator got featured in the magazine. Please read the magazine here linked.
