The Mentoring Effect on Economic Growth

In 2015, the World Economic Forum released its Outlook on the Global Agenda 2015, which features an analysis of the top ten trends that they believe are the key challenges facing the world's regions going forward. It's an overview of global leadership and governance as well as the emerging issues that they believe will define our future. The top three trends foreseen were:

• Deepening income inequality,
• Persistent jobless growth, and
• Lack of leadership.

Entrepreneurship and the closely linked support of mentors, act in part as a potential solution for each of the three trends above. It is clear that the incubation, development and support of sustainable entrepreneurship, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), can play a vital role in increasing employment and economic generation.

What is the return on investment for those who invest in mentoring as a component of human capital or capacity development? This paper outlines these pioneering findings.