BIC Africa successfully held the third edition of the soft-landing programme at the Sežana Incubator in Slovenia for three Somali Business incubation managers from the 27th to 30th May 2025, representing three prominent business incubators in Somalia.
The visiting incubators had a chance to:
🤝 Connect with European counterparts for knowledge sharing, partnerships, and explore the possibility of developing exchange programmes.
🚀Gain experience to successfully launch and run sustainable business incubation hubs.
📐Strengthen knowledge and capacity in designing and executing incubation programmes to help entrepreneurs build scalable businesses and innovation ecosystem.
🔍Identify and develop business models that align with their local realities to drive growth and sustainability of the business incubator.
🔐Access different markets, investors, and partners through the EU|BIC community.
The three days soft-landing programme was carried out by EU|BIC Sežana Incubator, led by Maja Cergol Lipnik, Assistant Director of the Sežana Incubator, who hosted Ayub Mohamud Hussein, Director Public Relations at SIMAD iLAB, Ahmed Yusuf Mohamed, Reginal Coordinator at HarHub, Mohamed Ali Dahir, Education Program Director at iRise Hub and representatives from the BIC Somali project. The delegation visited key Sežana Incubator infrastructures, Sežana’s ecosystem community, including schools, colleges, and had met with startups.
We are delighted with the commitment of our Somali colleagues. This partnership confirms that supportive entrepreneurial environments, regardless of geographical distance, have a lot in common and can offer each other a lot of value,
Maja Cergol Lipnik, Assistant Director of the Sežana Incubator.
This third edition, built on the success of the past two editions, successfully achieved empowering the visiting incubator managers through a first-hand learning and exchange with Slovenian practices in the field of business incubation, development of support programmes, ecosystem building and cooperation with local and international actors focusing on creative entrepreneurship that gave participants the chance to reflect on how such approaches could be adapted and applied in their own contexts. Moreover, the programme provided them with a valuable opportunity to explore the local ecosystem, explore new collaboration avenues, and strengthen entrepreneurial support systems across borders.
The BIC Africa Soft Landing Programme, a strategic capacity development initiative, is important for African business incubators in the five target countries for several key reasons, especially in terms of access to experts and ecosystem development. It reinforces the importance of global collaboration to boost African innovation ecosystem, enhance experts’ capacities and expands their networks, and embeds them more deeply into European ecosystem to develop the entrepreneurial ecosystems in their countries. This helps to accelerate innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainable economic growth across the continent by addressing the challenges faced.
We thank our host organisations and experts, the BIC Somali team, and UNIDO for supporting the programme and for the commitment to strengthening entrepreneurship in Somalia.
The soft-landing programme is implemented by EBN with the support of the European Union.
