Fostering Entrepreneurship in the Public Sector for Economic Development in Africa

Abstract

The success and prosperity of any country, developed or underdeveloped, is strictly and directly tied to the performance of its private, social, and public sectors, in separation or in combination. Public entrepreneurship can be conceived as the emergence and growth of new formal organizations, such as government bureaus, nonprofit or social enterprises, and the like. Public entrepreneurs, in that context, are individuals and groups who identify opportunities for achieving social or political objectives, assemble and invest resource to achieve these objectives, and (possibly) direct the newly created public or private enterprise. I argue in this paper that the objective of public entrepreneurship is to fulfill the public interest rather than to pursue private profit, and this necessitates ideas about the values of public resources and public outputs. The link is that both private and public entrepreneurs perceive gaps between actual and potential outcomes, and look for resources to close theses gaps. It is acknowledge that private entrepreneurs look ways to acquire resources and deploy them to achieve privately appropriable revenues, public entrepreneurs seek to channel resources to fulfill public or social interests and to deploy them on public objectives. Ndedi and Bunwaree (2007) argued that Africa needs more impetus from its leaders in order to get out of socio-economic underdevelopment. Thus, the need of entrepreneurs in the public sector for the upliftment of the bottom of the pyramid through sustainable economic development.

The first part of this paper discusses the concept of public entrepreneurship. The second part addresses the issue of bureaucracy and reckless behaviours of public servants that characterizes underdeveloped countries, and shows how entrepreneurship can be a source of novelty or innovation regarding the institutional environment or rules of the game (constitutions, laws, norms, property rights and regulatory systems). In short, the paper posits private entrepreneurship as a process focus on value creation and capture within a set of (shifting and non-immutable) rules.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, public sector, Africa, Development.