Professionalizing Agricultural Entrepreneurs from Marginalized Communities to Protest through Increased Economic Empowerment

• In Event: Notes from the Field: Challenges and Opportunities associated with Empowering Rural Youth for Social Change – Foregrounding Their Agency and Advocacy

Proposal

The Mandela Washington Fellowship (MWF) is the flagship program of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). It started in 2014 and aims to empower young leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through academic coursework, leadership training, and networking (U.S. Department of State, 2014). The fellowship program’s participants, i.e., Fellows, are usually diverse regarding their countries of origin; all 49 nations of SSA were represented in 2017 (U.S. Department of State, n.d.), and both genders are equally involved. The fellowship also strives to include participants with physical disabilities. The Fellows mostly range in age from 25 to 35 (Winters, 2017). It has U.S.-based and Africa-based activities. The U.S. activities consist of Academic and Leadership Institutes during which the Fellows receive six weeks of training at Institute providers, and attend the MWF Summit in Washington, DC held at the end of their Institute experiences.

A mixed methods study evaluated the impact of [Name] University’s 2018 Mandela Washington Fellowship Institute on its participants, including their communication behaviors associated with entrepreneurship. The study compared Fellows’ perceptions of entrepreneurship and their communication networks immediately before and after their Institute experiences and approximately five years later, i.e., a pre-post-post, descriptive, evaluation study. The study also sought to describe with whom the Fellows communicated and about what they communicated before and after the Institute, especially their business-related communications, and how changes in such affected their enterprises. Twenty-five Fellows from 20 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) nations, mostly agricultural and food entrepreneurs, participated in a six-weeks-long, training program (Institute) and were the sources of data. Retrospective evaluation and social network analysis were used to collect quantitative data to aid in answering eight research questions.

Regarding qualitative findings, content analysis was conducted of Fellows’ suggestions for improvements to the training, of interviews with key actors comprising their communication network, and of narrations describing self-selected visual images of their business ventures, i.e., a photovoice exercise. Most acknowledged that they would not have been equipped to improve their businesses without the Institute’s contributions to their professional development. The Fellows improved both knowledge and skills of entrepreneurship which they perceived had increased their effectiveness as entrepreneurs. They had extended their business contacts and other entrepreneurial endeavors through social networking communication tools and related behaviors. The Fellows used the knowledge acquired during the Institute to gain better access to information about business opportunities, including creating collaborations at home, in the SSA region, in other world regions, and with U.S. businesses. As such, the study’s results supported relevant aspects of social network theory, theory of planned behavior, and human capital theory.

Recommendations are offered for practice and additional research. More advance work by the funder who places the Fellows and by Institute providers may better address some Fellows’ specific learning needs and interests. Additional follow-up studies are needed to examine the cohort’s communication network’s expansion or compression over time and to monitor the progress of their enterprises especially regarding economically empowering them and their communities. The panel discussion will explore these and related issues.

Author

• Mahamane CISSE, Georgia Gwinnett College