Can the Commonwealth help drive entrepreneurship?

Joe Sarling        28th March 2011

Last week saw the Commonwealth Young Professionals Forum (CYPF) in Cardiff, the precursor to the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. The CYPF brought together around 60 young professionals involved in local government, enterprise or policy from Commonwealth member states with the aim to recommend suggestions in order to boost enterprise for the under-35s. Certainly, the potential to share experiences and ideas of best practice was large but exactly how practically successful it will be remains to be seen.

Bringing together young professionals from these regions highlighted how important the Commonwealth can be and how much influence it can have. This was a useful lesson to learn as it can help drive the recommendations put forwards. Furthermore, sharing ideas and solutions to problems from around the world can stimulate innovation – after all, young people are supposed to have this in abundance.

Key issues were discovered to be universal: young people find it hard to get enterprise credit; they are viewed with suspicion and lack legitimacy; there is a mismatch between education levels and job opportunities and; lack of a young voice/lobby at the higher levels of both local and national government, to name a few.

It is vitally important to highlight these similar issues – no one country suffers from them alone and a group of countries can drive forwards both policy and ideas. However, the problem here became the diversity of countries.

There are 54 independent member states with a huge disparity in population size, GDP and political system. Some issues raised were dealing with infrastructure – some townships do not have any roads and this most obviously stifles any entrepreneurship. Some countries would have a representative at local government level while some were claimed to have corruption running rife.

The overall disparity made creating legitimate and specific suggestions incredibly difficult. As a result, key recommendations were created such as: ‘facilitate youth representation at a local government level’; ‘encourage local government to engage with the private sector to be innovative in credit creation’ and; ‘use private sector individuals, on both a local and national level, to promote awareness of enterprise within schools’.

These are all excellent suggestions and issues which many countries, including the UK, have been crying out for to boost entrepreneurship within this demographic. Having said this, how effective these recommendations will be in individual countries is a different matter.

What the system needs is a general collection of suggestions and then further engagement by the Commonwealth offices in each country to put more specific detail onto the proposals. This will need the same young people driving forwards the same ideas under the umbrella of the same organisation. Without this network, the connections will break down and the suggestions will be lost.

The Commonwealth certainly has influence to add its weight to the young enterprise agenda. Here it can suggest key factors at both a local and national level and it has the opportunity to become thought-leading in this field. On a small scale it can promote the cause of young entrepreneurship by influencing local government while on a large scale it could facilitate trade links further boosting the global enterprise culture.

The Commonwealth certainly has an opportunity to influence rhetoric as long as the processes are in place to enhance engagement. Without this, it will be yet another talking shop to add to the already long list of ineffective-but-means-well organisations.