Young city investors team up to overcome start-up challenges

From left: Entrepreneurs Dennis Asiema, Mina Reeve and May Fernandez during the Nairobi City Young Entrepreneurs event at the Parklands Sports Club on Thursday. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU 

By Sandra Chao-Blasto, schao@ke.nationmedia.com

In Summary

• Young entrepreneurs create a forum to empower Nairobi youths venturing into business.

Starting a new business can be quite challenging, especially if you do not know the ropes. For those looking to venture into entrepreneurship at an early age, they tend to face more challenges than any person starting their first business would experience.

It is with this in mind that three innovative and business oriented youths have gone out on a limb to start a network of young entrepreneurs under 30 who have set up their businesses in Nairobi.

The idea to have young entrepreneurs from the city meet up and network was one that Mady Fernandez had been having for quite a while since he moved back to Kenya.

“After I completed my studies abroad and came back I knew I did not want to be employed I wanted to start my own business in digital marketing which was fairly a new thing in the country,” he said.

His Web in Motion company specialises in lead generation and uses animated videos and interactive video marketing services to promote content for his clients.

At that time he only knew of one young lady entrepreneur, a photographer, who had started her own company.

All through the registration process he struggled in his mind as to whether there were others facing similar challenges or there were ways of making the whole business set-up process easier.

It was only after he met his peer, Dennis Asiema, an IT enthusiast who started his own firm Infotech Africa which provides software solutions for enterprises, that his quest to have the idea come into fruition started becoming stronger.

“When Mina came along that’s when the ball started  rolling and less than a month later, here we are having our first meet up,” he said.

Mina Reeve, 25, the youngest of the three has experience in public relations (PR) and events organisation and is passionate about what she does.

When she came back home from the UK where she had studied experiential marketing  she joined a  PR and advertising company briefly before setting out to start her firm Nami Africa.

“We wanted to bring together peers so that they can be able to share experiences and challenges so that others can be able to learn from them,” said Ms Reeve

Nairobi City Young Entrepreneurs is a network that brings together enterprising individuals under 30 to help support one another through their entrepreneurial journey.

The group’s first meeting at the Parklands Sports Club in Nairobi last Thursday, brought together 40 entrepreneurs from various fields.

Apart from sharing their own experiences, they were also able to hear from three guest speakers on how to stay the enterprise course.

 When we initially advertised for registration, only 15 people booked their slots in the first two days but with only hours to the event we had over 80 interested individuals with ever growing numbers which shows just how many youths in Nairobi are interested in finding out how to better build their business,” said Mr Fernandez.

According to him while many youths want to venture into business rather than be employed, the majority do not know where to start in setting up an enterprise.

“Networking will help the aspiring entrepreneurs know how to deal with challenges like finding capital or building a good market base to ensure that their business is sustainable,” he explained.

Ms Reeves added: “At times a business that is just trying to get its footing and may require services of another firm as well as going to a more established firm might drive up my overhead costs but if I know of a start-up similar to mine we can be able to come up with a compromised costs based on the budget.”

While Mr Asiema and Mr Fernandez each have five years to be in the group, they are optimistic that the duration is enough to transform the entrepreneurial culture within Nairobi.

“We are not looking to monopolise leadership, we want to create a strong network for young entrepreneurs that can be able to survive even we get to graduate from the age group,” said Mr Asiema.