The Entrepreneurship Policy Framework and Implementation Guidance aims to support developing country policymakers in the design of initiatives, measures and institutions to promote entrepreneurship. It identifies policy objectives and options in the form of recommended actions, and proposes checklists, case studies and good practices. It also offers a user guide and methods for policy monitoring and evaluation, suggesting a set of indicators to measure progress.
The economic and social performance of Seychelles has been optimistic in recent years – it is, with Mauritius, the only high-income country in sub-Saharan Africa and has the highest Human Development Index on the continent.
The creation of new businesses not only generates value added, fiscal revenues, employment, and innovation, but it is also essential for the promotion of a knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy foreseen in Seychelles’ national development plans such as Vision 2033 and its National Development Strategy (NDS) 2019–2023. Also, entrepreneurship can be particularly relevant for the development of a strong blue economy and digital economy in the country, which has been identified in these plans as a prominent source of future economic growth.
However, as pointed out in the Seychelles Investment Policy Review (IPR) prepared by UNCTAD in 2020, local entrepreneurship is currently limited, mainly composed of micro enterprises characterized by low levels of productivity and innovation.2 Also the concludes that despite the Government’s efforts the country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem remains at an embryotic stage.
The challenges facing an entrepreneur in Seychelles are many: lack of central access to information on setting up a business; scale of administrative hurdles; limited access to funds; and an inability to scale up the enterprise. These speak to the need for the creation of a strategy with a clear action plan that will serve to strengthen the effectiveness of the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Seychelles in the wake of COVID-19.
The development of the National Entrepreneurship Strategy (NES) reinforces the Government’s message that strengthening Seychelles’ entrepreneurship ecosystem is in line with the country’s aspiration of becoming a knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, and it also recognizes that promoting entrepreneurship needs to be a harmonious and an inclusive process ensuring complementarity in objectives and efforts.
The NES may therefore prove crucial in providing national-level guidance on the kind of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs the Government wants to encourage.
