Why The Gambia must invest not only in funding young entrepreneurs, but also in the mindset, business acumen and support systems that make businesses resilient.
By: Dr. Muhammed Jawo
PhD in Management (Entrepreneurship)
There is a question we need to ask more honestly about youth entrepreneurship in The Gambia: Are we doing enough to help young people start businesses, or are we doing enough to help them survive and grow those businesses? The distinction matters.
Over the years, much of our conversation around youth entrepreneurship has understandably focused on access to finance. Young people need capital. They need training. They need equipment, markets and opportunities. These are real and urgent needs. But my research and experience working with young Gambian entrepreneurs have convinced me that there is another part of the conversation we cannot afford to overlook.
A young person can receive funding and still fail. A young person can have a brilliant idea and still fail. A young person can be extraordinarily persistent and still fail. This is not necessarily because the entrepreneur lacks ambition. Sometimes, the deeper problem is that entrepreneurial ambition has not yet been converted into the capabilities required to navigate an exceptionally difficult business environment.
This is where entrepreneurial mindset, business acumen and resilience become important.
Through my work with the Le-Jumbo Mentorship Program, I have had the opportunity to work directly with young Gambians from different educational and community backgrounds. The experience has reinforced something that is easy to miss when entrepreneurship is discussed only in terms of funding: young people do not all need the same intervention at the same time. Some need help developing confidence and an entrepreneurial mindset. Others need to understand how to turn an idea into a viable venture, how to think about customers and markets, or how to make better decisions when resources are limited.
The entrepreneur is operating in an environment, not in a textbook. Entrepreneurship is difficult anywhere. But entrepreneurship in a resource-constrained environment presents a different set of demands.
Young Gambian entrepreneurs often operate with limited access to finance, underdeveloped infrastructure, weak institutional support, limited access to entrepreneurial education and technology, and other structural and socio-cultural constraints. These conditions do not simply make starting a business difficult; they make remaining in business difficult. In such an environment, entrepreneurship requires more than identifying an opportunity. It requires the ability to make decisions when information is incomplete, manage scarce resources, understand customers, respond to changing market conditions, adjust business models, cope with setbacks and continue learning when the original plan does not work. In other words, resilience becomes central to entrepreneurship.
But resilience should not be misunderstood as simply “being strong” or “never giving up.” That understanding can actually be dangerous. If we tell a struggling entrepreneur simply to persist, we risk placing the responsibility for overcoming structural constraints entirely on the individual. There are situations in which persistence is admirable. There are also situations in which persistence without strategic reflection means repeatedly doing the wrong thing. Sometimes resilience means continuing. Sometimes it means changing direction. Sometimes it means abandoning one approach and trying another. Sometimes it means recognizing that the business model is no longer viable and having the knowledge to adapt before scarce resources are exhausted. Resilience is therefore not merely endurance. It is adaptive capacity.
What does my research among young Gambian entrepreneurs tells us? As part of my doctoral research at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Brawijaya, I examined these questions among young entrepreneurs in The Gambia. One of the studies drew on data from 203 Gambian entrepreneurs between the ages of 18 and 35, covering Banjul City, Kanifing Municipality and the West Coast Region. The findings provide an important lesson for how we think about entrepreneurship support.
Entrepreneurial mindset significantly predicted resilience. More importantly, business acumen helped explain how that relationship works. Entrepreneurial mindset had a significant direct relationship with resilience, while business acumen also significantly predicted resilience. Business acumen partially mediated the relationship between entrepreneurial mindset and resilience, accounting for 32.2% of the pathway. The model explained 74.9% of the variance in entrepreneurial resilience.
Put simply, having the mindset to confront uncertainty matters, but knowing what to do with that mindset matters too. This distinction is critical.
Entrepreneurial mindset gives an entrepreneur the psychological orientation to see possibilities, believe that action is possible and respond proactively to uncertainty. But business acumen provides the practical intelligence needed to translate that orientation into decisions. Business acumen includes the ability to understand markets, manage finances, plan strategically and make decisions under uncertainty.
That means a young entrepreneur who is optimistic about the future but does not understand cash flow may still make poor decisions. An entrepreneur who is confident but does not understand the customer may still build the wrong product. An entrepreneur who is persistent but cannot distinguish between a temporary setback and a fundamentally flawed business model may simply persist in the wrong direction.
Mindset matters. But mindset without Business Acumen is incomplete.
This is also why practical entrepreneurship matters beyond the classroom. Through Le Jumbo, my own experience of building and operating an e-commerce business has required me to confront questions around vendors, pricing, customer acquisition, online customer service, digital marketing, operational efficiency and performance monitoring. These are not abstract concepts when one is responsible for making a business work. They are daily decisions, and each decision has consequences.
Perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by “persistence and passion”
There is another finding from the research that I believe deserves particular attention. Entrepreneurial mindset significantly predicted business persistence. Business acumen also significantly predicted persistence. But business persistence itself did not significantly predict resilience. Nor did it significantly mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial mindset and resilience. The same pattern emerged with passion.
This does not mean persistence and passion are unimportant. It means something more subtle. Effort or passion alone may not be enough to overcome systemic constraints.
For a young entrepreneur operating in a difficult market, working harder is not always the answer. Sometimes the answer is working differently. The entrepreneur needs to know when to persist, what to change, where to allocate scarce resources, which customers to pursue, when to pivot, how to manage risk and how to learn from failure.
This is why I believe our entrepreneurship policies must move beyond the language of only “grit” and “empowerment” and pay greater attention to strategic capability. We should not simply ask whether a young entrepreneur is motivated. We should ask whether that entrepreneur has the knowledge and support necessary to make good decisions.
Therefore, what should this mean for policy?
If we accept that entrepreneurial resilience is shaped not only by psychological resources but also by practical capabilities, then our approach to youth entrepreneurship support needs to evolve.
- First, funding should come with capability development. We should stop thinking of entrepreneurship support as a choice between finance and training. Young entrepreneurs need both. A grant can provide the resources to begin. But training in financial management, market analysis, pricing, customer discovery, strategic planning, digital tools and business-model development can determine whether those resources are used effectively. A more effective intervention would therefore combine (finance, business acumen, mentorship, monitoring, market access). The objective should not simply be to distribute money. The objective should be to increase the probability that the business survives.
- Second, mentorship should become a core part of the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Entrepreneurs do not experience challenges according to the timetable of a training programme. The difficult decision often comes after the workshop. It comes when a customer refuses to pay, when a supplier changes the price, when cash flow becomes tight, when a product does not sell, when a partnership fails, or when the entrepreneur begins questioning whether the business can continue. This is where sustained mentorship matters. My own experience founding and coordinating the Le-Jumbo Mentorship Program has reinforced for me that young entrepreneurs benefit enormously from having access to people who can challenge their assumptions, share experience, provide perspective and help them think through difficult decisions. It has also shown me the importance of continuity. We therefore need to think about mentorship not as an occasional event, but as part of the infrastructure of entrepreneurship development in The Gambia. The programme has grown through successive cohorts since 2022, bringing together young people from the community, high schools and tertiary institutions. That diversity matters because entrepreneurship development cannot be treated as a one-size-fits-all exercise. Young people enter the entrepreneurial journey with different levels of exposure, knowledge, confidence and readiness, and the support system should be capable of responding to those differences.
- Third, universities also have a responsibility in this ecosystem to further strengthen how entrepreneurship is positioned within higher education. Entrepreneurship should not be treated simply as a course that students complete before graduation. It should become part of a broader institutional ecosystem that connects entrepreneurship education with mentorship, venture development, research, incubation and market access. Universities could build on their existing efforts by strengthening entrepreneurship education by connecting students with practising entrepreneurs and creating opportunities for students to develop and test real ventures. It could also play a much stronger research role by generating evidence on business survival, entrepreneurial capabilities and the effectiveness of entrepreneurship interventions in The Gambia. Hence, if we are serious about developing resilient young entrepreneurs, universities must help students not only understand entrepreneurship, but practise it, study it and build enterprises within an environment that allows them to learn from both success and failure.
- Fourth, we need to measure business survival/sustainability, not only business creation. When an entrepreneurship programme reports that 100, 500 or 1,000 young people have been supported, an important question remains: What happened to those businesses afterwards? How many survived? How many increased their revenues? How many created jobs? How many expanded? How many survived a major economic shock? How many were able to access new markets? These questions would give us a much better understanding of whether entrepreneurship interventions are actually working. A successful entrepreneurship programme should not be judged only by how many certificates it distributes or how many businesses it launches. It should be judged by the quality, survival and growth of the enterprises it helps create.
- Fifth, we must help young entrepreneurs access markets, not just capital. Capital without customers cannot sustain a business. Young entrepreneurs need opportunities to participate in value chains, supply larger organizations, access public and private procurement opportunities, enter regional markets and use digital platforms to reach customers beyond their immediate communities. If we want entrepreneurship to contribute meaningfully to employment and economic development, then we must ask not only, “How do we finance young entrepreneurs?” but also, “How do we help them find and retain customers?” The second question is just as important as the first. From my own experience in Le Jumbo e-commerce has made this particularly clear. Building a digital business is not simply about putting products online. It involves coordinating vendors, thinking carefully about pricing, attracting and retaining customers, managing online service, monitoring performance and using information to improve operations. The digital economy therefore creates opportunities, but it also demands capabilities. Access to a platform does not automatically translate into a sustainable enterprise.
- Last but not the least, resilience must become an explicit objective of entrepreneurship development. We should design programmes that teach young entrepreneurs how to respond to uncertainty rather than assuming resilience will automatically emerge from hardship. This means developing skills around adaptive problem-solving, opportunity recognition, strategic decision-making, financial preparedness and business-model adaptation. My research Jawo et al. (2026) suggests that resilience can be approached as something that is developed through the interaction between psychological resources and practical competencies not simply as an inherent personality characteristic. That is an important shift in thinking. If resilience can be developed, then it can also be incorporated into entrepreneurship education, mentorship and policy design.
In conclusion, there is one final point I believe we need to confront. There is sometimes a tendency to celebrate the Gambian entrepreneur for being able to “survive despite everything.” There is something admirable about that resilience. But we should be careful not to romanticize hardship. Resilience should not become an excuse for inadequate systems. We should not tell young people that because successful entrepreneurs have overcome difficult conditions, young entrepreneurs today should simply overcome them too. Entrepreneurs need resilience, but they also need functioning institutions. They need access to finance, infrastructure, reliable markets, education, technology, networks and mentorship. They need policies that recognize the realities of operating a business in a resource-constrained environment. The responsibility for entrepreneurial success therefore cannot rest entirely on the individual entrepreneur. It must be shared between the entrepreneur and the ecosystem in which that entrepreneur operates. The Gambia already has entrepreneurial potential. The question, in my view, is no longer whether Gambian young people are entrepreneurial. They are! I have seen this not only through research but through years of working with young entrepreneurs and building entrepreneurship initiatives in The Gambia. The challenge is how we convert that entrepreneurial energy into sustainable enterprises. That requires us to think differently about what young entrepreneurs need. They need capital but capital alone is insufficient. They need an entrepreneurial mindset but mindset alone is insufficient. They need persistence and passion but persistence and passion without strategic direction can become costly.
What they ultimately need is the combination of psychological readiness (Mindset), business capability (Business Acumen), and an ecosystem that gives them a realistic chance to adapt and grow.
My research suggests that entrepreneurial mindset can contribute to resilience, but that the translation of mindset into practical business capability is a critical part of that process. This has a straightforward policy implication: If we want resilient Gambian entrepreneurs, we must stop asking only how to help young people start businesses. We must ask how to help them become better decision-makers, better strategists and better adapters once the business has started.
The Gambia does not need to manufacture entrepreneurial spirit. Our young people already have it. What we need is an ecosystem capable of turning that spirit into knowledge, knowledge into action, action into resilient business enterprises, and resilient business enterprises into jobs, innovation and national development.
That, ultimately, is the entrepreneurship policy conversation we should be having.
