Promoting youth entrepreneurship in Lagos, Nigeria - SNHU ...

children to go into businesses. The use of events like business plan competitions, expositions,awards could also be used to motivate young people to accept entrepreneurship as a viable careeroption.2.7.5 Information and Marketing:One of the key problems facing youth run enterprises relates to limited prospects for valueaddition and saturated market. Furthermore, youth run enterprises especially those in poorcountries, are concentrated in low value local markets. Such youth lack access to information onproduct and input markets because of poor infrastructures. Thus, promoting the viability of youthrun enterprises will require facilitating the access of youth to information on product and inputmarkets and linking them to global value chains. This will require encouraging youth to exploreexisting global initiatives aimed at promoting trade between developed countries and leastdeveloped countries. An example is the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) passed bythe US Congress which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton (Chigunta, 2006) .There isurgent need to explore the opportunities that such global trade initiatives offer to potential youthentrepreneurs and existing youth enterprises.2.7.6 Power and Lack of Business Incubation Centers:No nation can solve its unemployment problem if electricity to run small businesses is notguaranteed. Any developed economy depends mainly on electricity to drive the activities of smalland medium scale enterprises. There is need to put in place very sound energy policies that wouldbe conducive for youth to take on entrepreneurship as a viable option and not a death trap.Without sound power policy, industry will continue to have -unemployment -idle hands-32