"Before the coaching, I had this thought stuck in my head that if I fell, I wouldn't be able to get back on my feet," says 27-year-old entrepreneur Hafssatou Maïga, referring to her poultry business. She is one of the "rising stars" of Generation Food, an agrifood business incubator organised in Ouagadougou. What can change when young food entrepreneurs such as Hafssatou get concrete, tailored support, and what does that mean for the city they feed?

Informality and entrepreneurship feeding a city

In Burkina Faso, over 90% of businesses operate informally, without registration, bookkeeping or taxation. Most of these are micro-enterprises in the food sector, concentrated in the capital city of Ouagadougou. The poultry sector alone supplies 80,000 chickens to the city every day¹.

Those numbers are the result of hard work since the founders are largely self-taught. A study of business failure in Burkina Faso found that 66% of entrepreneurs started out with no training in business² management.

An incubation programme with "local roots" and "global wings"

Generation Food is a Rikolto initiative, active in cities across Africa, Europe and Latin America. In each city, it is co-designed with local partners, because what works in one context does not automatically work in another.

In Ouagadougou, that partner is ADEU, the Urban Economic Development Agency of the Municipality. And with them, the lessons learned from the first cohort were put into practice in the second. A first cohort ran from 2021 to 2023 with 77 young entrepreneurs; this was a large group that required eight coaches and significant resources. For the second cohort, the team decided to deliver focused coaching to the selected group of entrepreneurs.

That second edition ran from 2024 to 2025, funded by YOUCA, a Belgian organisation that channels young people's earnings into social projects worldwide. Another 15 young entrepreneurs were selected from 62 candidates, who went through a competitive hackathon and pitch process. Hafssatou, Issouf and Eunice were among them.

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