From entrepreneur to educator and scholar

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Clint Davies grew up in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. His father, a fishing trawler skipper, was the breadwinner and mostly away from home through Clint’s formative years. Clint, his younger brother and two sisters were raised largely by their mother, in a family home that still stands today in Mitchells Plain.

Ask him about school, and he will modestly say that he was average. But he wasn’t a typical teenager either. “For my entire stint at Westridge High School, I worked part-time at a bakery. I think that gave me my first taste of economic independence, as well as of the stubbornness and perseverance I would need to become an entrepreneur,” he says.

And become an entrepreneur, he did. By his mid-twenties, Clint owned two successful businesses: one of them a bakery in Rocklands, Mitchells Plain that employed about 20 people full- and part-time.

“It gave me immense pride and joy to provide those jobs, thinking that it made a difference to several people and their families,” Clint says.

There’s a fine balance in Clint’s life: while at school, he worked part-time. While running his businesses, he studied part-time, attaining qualifications in business management that helped him to improve his own approach to work. He reminisces about how those early days of study brought him into the university setting, where he was invited to become a tutor, then tutor coordinator, research assistant, and lecturer.

“I was shifting from a business practitioner to a research educator,” he says. “Eventually I had to leave my business. It wasn’t an easy step at all. When I left, I felt something inside me break.”

But Clint’s departure also motivated him in his new endeavours. His passion for job creation and business efficiency drove him to achieve his PhD in entrepreneurship education and training efficacy from the University of Pretoria. His doctorate was published in 2023, and he is proud to see that it is receiving citations. This means his contribution to science is receiving some recognition and making a difference.

Now, Clint is joining the Allan Gray Centre for Africa Entrepreneurship (AGCAE), where he will pursue further post-doctoral research with a focus on research in support of entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems development.

“I realised that as an entrepreneurship support player in the broader ecosystem, I am only as good as the ecosystem itself,” he says. “Being at AGCAE will allow me to develop data-driven actions we can take as a collective to improve this support.”

One of the biggest stumbling blocks facing entrepreneurs in South Africa, Clint says, is the lack of self-belief. Many gaps exist in external factors, but self-belief and skills development are personal qualities that entrepreneurs have immense power to change.

“I know in my heart and mind that entrepreneurs can be taught and supported to start up, run, and scale their businesses. Each entrepreneur we train and support to do better than yesterday is a step forward,” he says.

He has many motivations for doing this work. Mainly, he wants to address South Africa’s socioeconomic inequality. There is his family, who inspires him: his sons and daughters, his siblings and his parents support over the decades behind his life-long learning appetite. He further enjoys ordinary daily interactions with other people. “Those easy and often fun times when we find common ground as people, outside of our professional lives. These moments move me.”

As he returns to Cape Town after nearly a decade in Pretoria, Clint might also delight in a favourite hobby of his: hiking. He has already conquered the Drakensberg, Fish River Canyon, Blyde River Canyon and the mighty Amathole Mountains. Now he is looking towards his next challenge. His ambition at the AGCAE, is to produce and contribute relevant research output towards the Centre’s objectives as a data hub and research centre of excellence.