Mobile application linking entrepreneurs to mentors and investors

Abstract

There is a growing culture of entrepreneurship in Africa with countries like Kenya becoming centers for innovation and entrepreneurship. This is evidenced by the development of world-leading technological innovations like MPESA - a renowned mobile phone based money transfer platform pioneered by Kenya’s largest telecommunication company, Safaricom. Despite existing potential, young African start-ups and existing businesses in the technology sector are faced with multiple challenges. Lack of access to capital, mentorship and training stand out among key challenges. This study reviews existing systems employed to address concerns such as limited access to funding, mentorship, and training by entrepreneurs. It identifies these systems’ limitations and proposes how they can be improved. The waterfall methodology was used to undertake the reseach and the development of an Android based mobile application that will address the current gap of accessing metors and investors. Out of the total sampled population , 90% of the entrepreneurs confirmed that they had faced difficulties in accessing mentors and investors . The application was validated after development and 95% of the sampled population highly welcomed the adoption of a mobile application that had been developed to address the gap. The developed mobile application will facilitate entrepreneur’s access to mentorship allowing them to gain the skills needed to run their businesses and investors who can inject capital to actualise their ideas and stimulate growth. This is likely to promote entrepreneurship in Kenya and lead to a more stable economy. There is a possibility that most of the African countries will adopt the use of the Android based mobile application.