Bouba Ismaila, John Beneke
Abstract
The importance of entrepreneurship has never been placed at the forefront of economic development like it has in the recent few decades despite having been practiced for centuries. The African continent is in a dire need of developing its entrepreneurial ecosystem to drive its economy. This study sought to compare the South Africa’s entrepreneurship mind-set in comparison to partners within the BRICS+ alliance. The sample size used was eight out of the 10 countries that form the alliance because there was no data for Ethiopia and Russia in the data that was used for the five-year period under consideration. The data has been collected and validated by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) for their regular reports on the global entrepreneurship outlook. To analyse the data, pivot tables in Excel were used to extract the necessary data and summarise it, then visualise it using column charts to gain insights and make comparisons between the countries within the group and South Africa. The results showed that South Africa is behind with most of the measures that have been evaluated. This implies that the country needs to do more for its population to start getting comfortable with the idea of doing own business as a way of earning a living.