CAPE TOWN - Young people need to create businesses that would impact on unemployment, access to quality education and social cohesion, in order to improve the country.
This is according to Aisha Pandor, co-founder and chief executive of SweepSouth, a national home cleaning service.
During a panel discussion at the Africa Travel Summit, taking place in Langa in Cape Town and organised by global home sharing platform, Airbnb, Pandor said a challenge that South Africa faced was the high rate of unemployment which needed to be changed by young people going into entrepreneurship and creating jobs.
Pandor said that she decided to become an entrepreneur as she believed that her business would have an impact on the social landscape. “I felt like business was part of something where I could have an impact and so I moved into the business world and I didn’t like being employed and eventually came up with the idea of SweepSouth,” she said.
Stephan Ekbergh, chief executive of Travelstart, an African online travel booking agency based in Cape Town, said his business career started when he was a young boy selling strawberries and potatoes in his small village in Sweden.
“For me, I think my career started when I was 5, 6 or 7 years old, somewhere around there selling strawberries and potatoes in the summer to housewives in the little village that we grew up in the country of Sweden,” he said.
He added that starting entrepreneurship at a young age had been his advantage in understanding different customers and what they wanted.
“Being an entrepreneur, I think there are so many aspects of being an entrepreneur, you can be an entrepreneur in so many different ways, like for instead, if you have a financial background, you will start your business with that mindset, when I came in my business with the very clear understanding of what makes a customer's heart beat."