AGAHI Awards 2013 to include Entrepreneurship as one of the key categories.

Promoting entrepreneurial growth in Pakistan

AGAHI to include Entrepreneurship as one of the categories for the AGAHI Award 2013

Promoting entrepreneurial growth in Pakistan

Celebrating the Global Entrepreneurship Week, twenty prominent Pakistani entrepreneurs, government officials and academic leaders gathered at a round-table meeting on ‘Creating an Enabling Environment for Entrepreneurship to Grow’ in Islamabad today. Panellists explored ways to promote entrepreneurial growth in Pakistan, emphasizing that entrepreneurs have the potential to create solutions that can transform Pakistan and generate new jobs for millions of young graduates entering the workforce.

AGAHI Awards, the foremost journalism awards in Pakistan will continue to include entrepreneurship as one of categories for the AGAHI Awards 2013. Agahi Awards are the most sought after industry recognition awards in Pakistan. Launched in 2011, the awards have included journalists from print, television, radio and internet. Last year more than 700 journalists across Pakistan sent their contributions for the awards. 

After avoiding the collapse of the global financial and economic system, governments around the world are now focused on building a foundation for future growth. In addition to safeguarding the economic recovery, the world is facing a number of transformative challenges, such as an increasing scarcity of natural resources, significant demographic shifts, and the environmental and social implications of climate change.

In dealing with these challenges, governments have taken an increasingly strong interest in entrepreneurship. Speaking on the occasion, Amir Jahangir, Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and CEO Mishal Pakistan, said “Entrepreneurs are recognized as important drivers of economic and social progress, and rapidly growing entrepreneurial enterprises are viewed as important sources of innovation, employment and productivity growth”. Some of the most influential enterprises of our time began relatively recently as small entrepreneurial ventures, he further added.

The participants emphasized the need for the capacity building of the media on creating Entrepreneurship as a new beat in Pakistan. They emphasized the importance of a media fund, which can encourage young entrepreneurs and journalists to create more relevant content on entrepreneurship. The initiative would also be able to create a new breed of mediapreneurs and journalists to understand and report on the opportunities and challenges of being an entrepreneur in Pakistan.

Many recent public discussions have addressed the challenges that entrepreneurs face in Pakistan. The roundtable moved the discussion to the next level by developing a concrete set of recommendations to the Government of Pakistan on how to overcome the challenges and improve the business environment in Pakistan.

Panellists focused their discussions on the pivotal role of Pakistan’s private sector in spurring job creation.  Were an entrepreneurship ecosystem to take root, panellists said, Pakistan’s economic growth could accelerate.

Many governments are therefore trying to actively promote entrepreneurship through various forms of support. The World Economic Forum has been actively engaging early-stage and later-stage high-growth companies for many years through its Technology Pioneers programme and its community of Global Growth Companies.

Creating Enabling Environment for Entrepreneurship to Grow in Pakistan - Key Recommendations for action:

• Triple helix” entrepreneurial ecosystem components: industry, academia and government);
• Changing policies, laws and regulations to make it easy for startups;
• Improving access to finance—equity, debt and venture capital—and use of movable assets as collateral;
• Removing instruments of rent-seeking , which dwindle resources available for entrepreneurs;
• Building growth cities – urban development in line with the new growth strategy;
• Developing and managing brand, guarantees, warrantees/returns;
• Embedding entrepreneurship in education and business incubations;
• Releasing the energy of the domestic sector;
• Developing Science and Technology policy and its implementation;
• Engendering entrepreneurship;
• Role of intellectual property rights (IPR), including protection of trademarks, websites, copyrights and patents;