More than 700 entrepreneurs from around the world are meeting at the Global Entrepreneurship summit as it enters its third and final day Friday on the U.S. West Coast.
The conference in San Jose, California, where President Barack Obama will speak Friday, aims to link entrepreneurs with investors around the world; but young, aspiring businessmen and women are focused on more than finding investors. Networking, sharing ideas, and building bridges between communities and cultures have been some of the fruits reaped from this event.
Though most of the entrepreneurs invited to the conference began work on projects that were local, they found their ideas and their challenges to be globally relevant.
Elsa Marie D’Silva is the founder and managing director of Safecity - a platform that crowd-sources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. Though she started her work in India, she soon realized "the enormity of the problem."
"Everywhere I go somebody or the other has a story to share," she told VOA.
Another attendee, Steven Ozoigbo - the CEO of the African Technology Foundation - was born in Nigeria but now lives in California. He said he encountered knowledge gaps in Africa that impede more entrepreneurial creativity on the continent, but believes the key is in globalization; in giving Africans access to a broad range of people and ideas.
"Connecting the continents, to the West, particularly Silicon Valley, is our main path for trying to bridge some of these gaps," he told VOA. "Knowing that the problem, the gender problem, the gender issues in Tech, the gender issues in business, are not uniquely African, they're a global problem."
American-born Michael Lwin also noticed contrast between the U.S. and his family's homeland of Myanmar. In particular, watching his motivated, educated cousin Yaza struggle to make ends meet motivated him to Koe Koe Tech, which helps rural populations.
"I thought this was kind of really unfair right? So I had the benefit of this Geographic Lottery," he told VOA. "I had kind of a straightforward easy life, whereas Yaza, despite being incredibly industrious, was really not doing very well and being incredibly talented and so this stuck with me... I believe that places sort of a moral obligation on me to try and help.
Whether connecting the West to their roots or discovering that their community's problems are felt globally, entrepreneurs from around the world are gaining much more than investors at the summit this week.
And it's not only countries abroad that will profit from networking - or investing.
President Obama will speak to the global audience Friday night, ready to embrace the nearly 700 minds from around the world sharing their ideas.
"As you know, good ideas come from everywhere," White House spokesman Eric Schultz said aboard Air Force one late Thursday. "However, access to capital and opportunity is not the same everywhere. That's why our goal at this year's summit is to connect the United States with new audiences and partners worldwide."
Officials said that the more they invest in entrepreneurship abroad, the more those communities become markets for American-made goods.
via Voice of America http://ift.tt/28RjMLi
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