After yesterday’s action-packed day, I was prepared for a relaxing Friday. Jessica Jackley Flannery shattered my hopes immediately and completely. She told another improbable story: how a few friends, making a few loans of a couple of dollars each, helping a few farmers in Uganda, grew within the space of a few years to kiva.org, an international community of 470,000 lenders providing US$ 65,000,000 in loans to 95,000 entrepreneurs. The recovery rate of these loans is an amazing 98% with interest rates about 10% below the norm for most micro-finance programs. Go to http://kiva.org to learn more and become a lender yourself.

What strikes me again and again listening to stories of Jessica and Alicia yesterday (pictured below), is how improbable they sound and how they rely more on character, grit and determination than on anything we can teach in an Entrepreneurship class.

What is especially heartening is that many of these very modern success stories are being told by women. In fact, a decade or so ago, a conference like this would have attracted very few women. Today, almost half of the participants were female. In fact, if you leave out the age groups north of 40, I would wager that women were in the majority. In entrepreneurship, the glass ceiling has not only shattered, it has disappeared completely!

And then there was William Kamkwamba from Malawi. His story is so unbelievable, all I’m going to provide you with is a link to YouTube: Moving Windmills. Who said there was no entrepreneurial spirit in Africa?

And so ends a magnificent three day event. There was a lot of networking going on. I’m especially pleased that South African organisations pitched up in great numbers. Richard Branson School of Entrepreneurship, Raizcorp, SEDA, DTI, Wits Business School, the City of Cape Town, the Bandwidth Barn, TSiBA of course, and just about anyone who is anyone in SA entrepreneurship was there.

Wow! What a day! Almost every event was superlative.

A session on Entrepreneurship Support Structures was highly relevant to our work at the Entrepreneurship Centre. It started with a very provocative question and one I continually grapple with at TSiBA: how on earth can a non-profit organization (university, incubator, government agency) teach entrepreneurs to make a profit? Can a non-profit truly produce the aggressive tigers that thrive in the market place or do they produce tame lions that die once they are let out into the wild? A troubling question with no easy answer…

Another highlight was Mansoor Mohamed (pictured above), Executive Director for Economic, Social Development and Tourism of the City of Cape Town, whom Leigh and I had just met in his office last week. He gave a compelling overview of the steps that the City is taking to foster entrepreneurship and innovation. One of his pet projects is an innovation hub, an area of about 10 hectares; where organisations in the entrepreneurship space will be housed together to create synergies and economic opportunities beyond their individual potential. One of these is a well-known provider of a tertiary degree in Entrepreneurial Leadership. A serial entrepreneur himself, it is heartening to see a dynamic business person like Mansoor in such an influential position within city management.

And just when we thought it couldn’t get much better, Alicia Polak, an ex-investment banker who left Merrill Lynch well before their demise, told her story of starting Khaya Cookies, a very profitable venture targeting unemployable women from Khayelitsha to produce high-quality cookies both for local consumption and for export to the United States.

The icing of the cake goes to Cebisa, who entered the Elevator Pitch Competition. He did really well, and tomorrow we will learn whether he can go through to the finals. “I have never been so nervous in all my life”, a visibly relieved Cebisa confided to me after the event.

And just as we were completely exhausted, the Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, Kenneth P. Morse, pulled off an entrepreneurial show of epic dimensions. Whatever I try to say about his performance, you wouldn’t believe it. So I won’t even go there…

Cebisa and I are attending a three-day workshop on Business Start-ups (http://www.mitgsw.org/) organized by MIT and the WITS Business School. We are being sponsored by the McCoombs School of Business of the University of Texas (thanks David!). The day started of with a riveting keynote address by Euvin Naidoo of WITS. Later, there was an excellent panel discussion by university students that started their own businesses while they were still studying, something we have often discussed at TSiBA. Tomorrow has several highlights, but I will especially be following Cebisa in the Elevator Pitch Competition! Between sessions, there is a lot of networking going on and Cebisa certainly works the crowd.