ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the opportunities and challenges confronting youth entrepreneurs in an urban environment. It highlights the background characteristics of youth entrepreneurs and the enterprises they run, examines youth enterprise formation including their skills acquisition, social networks, and other inputs required to run a business and assesses the opportunities and challenges confronting young people and how these affect their business operations. An appreciable proportion of the youth surveyed in Nima-Maamobi run small businesses. Consequently, for poor urban communities such as Nima-Maamobi, the key starting point in youth entrepreneurship development is for city authorities to make a concerted effort to improve infrastructure and other basic services by upgrading the area. Schoof summarises the challenges of youth entrepreneurship as follows: sociocultural legitimacy and acceptance of young entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship education and training, access to finance and start-up capital, rigorous administrative and regulatory frameworks, and business development and support services.
