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LABOUR-BOLIVIA: Infusing Business with Youth, Innovation

Bernarda Claure

LA PAZ, Jun 19 2008 (IPS) - Cotillones El Sol organises parties in Tarija, in southern Bolivia. Nancy Martínez, the 23-year-old manager and owner of the six-month-old company, already employs several other young women.

The small business’s creative, original party favours are sought out in the capital of the province of Tarija, where Martínez and her “students”, as she calls her employees, give form to imagination with fabric, cardboard and sponges.

“Now I want to expand my business to other cities,” she remarks confidently to IPS.

Her case is one of the successful results of vocational training and capacity-building programmes carried out in the last few years in Bolivia, aimed at promoting micro-enterprise and small businesses to fight unemployment, that go beyond traditional business structures.

Unemployment stands at eight percent in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country. But another 40 percent of Bolivians work in the informal sector of the economy, with poorly-paid work, long working days and no social and labour benefits.

Young people suffer the brunt of unemployment and underemployment, even those who hold a university degree. Statistics from the governmental Social and Economic Policies Analysis Unit show that it takes university graduates an average of two years to find a job after college.

The Bolivian economy is highly dependent on the export of commodities like natural gas, soybeans and soy products, unrefined petroleum, zinc ore and tin, and has a weak, uncompetitive industrial and productive base

But even in this unfavourable context, there are reasons to dream of a generation of new business people, who think outside the box and explore possibilities that branch out from the traditional commodity-based business opportunities in Bolivia, said Miguel Hoyos, general coordinator of the Red Bolivia Emprendedora (RBE – Bolivian Entrepreneurship Network).

The RBE, which will host the Nov. 17-23 Global Entrepreneurship Week in Bolivia, kicked off, with great fanfare on Jun. 13, the five months of activities that will culminate in the global event.

Young business leaders in some 60 countries will take part in the first annual Global Entrepreneurship Week, whose goal is to engage and encourage young people around the world to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives, with the support of the business community, government officials and civil society groups.

In Bolivia, a total of 20 activities to awaken interest among young people to get involved in productive initiatives, such as on-line competitions for creative business ideas and plans, will take place over the next five months in the provinces of La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca and Tarija, with the support of universities, private institutions, companies and municipal governments.

The Global Entrepreneurship Week was created by Make Your Mark, a national campaign to create an enterprise culture among young people in the United Kingdom that was founded by the country’s four main business organisations, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the United States.

The goal of the campaign is “to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity” and promote “a culture of entrepreneurship.”

In Latin America, that trend has already taken hold in countries like Colombia and Ecuador, with the promotion of more inclusive companies infused with a greater sense of social responsibility, that are more respectful of the environment and more sensitive to the needs of society.

In a videotaped message presented the launch of activities in Bolivia, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow Jonathan Ortmans said that all people, regardless of their social origins or situation, can turn a good idea into an economic activity that will help boost the country’s development.

But there is nothing like leading by example. At the La Paz gathering, Nancy Martínez and young people from other regions presented their innovative business endeavours.

They included Francisco Anzaldo, one of the toymakers who make hand-made wooden products for Anatina Toys, which has begun to export to the United States and Europe.

And Walter Melendres, from the highlands town of Jesús de Machaca, employs more than 50 people in making pottery that is exported to 15 different countries.

University Professor Gonzalo Chávez, an economic analyst, says these cases have been successful because they have taken a step beyond mere subsistence. “If enterprises become productive initiatives aimed at generating employment and not only an income for the owners, we will see a veritable revolution in production,” he told IPS.

Potential growth areas are exports of llama meat, quinoa grain, wooden furniture, technology and services, he said. “Traditional business leaders cannot and should not try it, because they have the ‘chip’ of living comfortably off their wealth stuck in their heads. But young people today have another way of looking at things,” said Chávez.

That is the basic premise of the Fundación Emprender (Entrepreneur Foundation) in Tarija, one of whose lines of action is education on entrepreneurship, involving visits to schools and universities to share successful, inspiring experiences with young people.

The foundation’s representative, Álvaro Bazán, explained to IPS that one of the aims is to inculcate in young people an understanding that innovative entrepreneurs don’t study to find a job, but to create one.

Fundación Emprender works with Junior Achievement, an educational programme for young people that emerged in the United States before expanding to a number of countries, and which now reaches thousands of Bolivian students in Tarija, Sucre – the capital of the southern province of Chuquisaca – and Santa Cruz in the east. Soon it will also begin to be implemented in La Paz and its sprawling working-class suburb of El Alto.

The programme has had interesting results: 12 businesses created by students, including a natural juice company, a plastic bottle recycling company, and a firm that produces interactive compact discs to help students prepare for university entrance exams.

Minister of Production and Microenterprise Javier Hurtado said the focus must be on innovative initiatives. “If we want to generate strong economic, social and environmental indicators, we definitely need a new concept of business person and entrepreneur.”

Hurtado was honoured by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as the head of a socially responsible Bolivian agribusiness concern that boosts the incomes of indigenous people by buying their organic vegetables and grains and selling them on the local and international market.

As a recognised social entrepreneur, Hurtado applauded that institutions and businesses are promoting an innovative, enterprising spirit in different ways, and committed himself to supporting actions “that can contribute to the country based on this new business vision, generating value, employment, and decent living conditions.”