VOICE ONE:

I'm Steve Ember.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Shirley Griffith with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today we tell about entrepreneurs and the problems they face starting businesses around the world.

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VOICE ONE:

Bill Gates

"Entrepreneur" is a French word that means someone who does something. An entrepreneur is someone who attempts to organize resources in new and more valuable ways and accepts full responsibility for the result.

Entrepreneurs bring a new product, service or idea to market. For more than a century, entrepreneurs have changed the world. American Bill Gates is perhaps the world's best-known entrepreneur. He did not invent personal computers. But his operating system made computers easy to use. It also brought the new technology to millions of people around the world.

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Wendell Cochran is a journalism professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He says the Internet is a very helpful tool for entrepreneurs. That is because it provides information to anyone, anywhere.

Craig Newmark is an example of another American entrepreneur. Thirteen years ago, Mister Newmark created an Internet message service for the investment company where he worked. Today, his web site, Craig's List, has users in more than five hundred fifty hundred cities and fifty countries. They can buy and sell goods, find a job or a place to live.

VOICE ONE:

Modern technology has made it easier for entrepreneurs around the world to succeed. However, they still have problems getting money to start businesses and deal with government restrictions in many countries. In Venezuela, for example, monetary exchange controls and a leadership hostile to free markets make it difficult to do business. Santiago Alvarez is a businessman in Caracas. He says it is difficult to get all the permits necessary to start a business.

Sunil Mittal

In India, Sunil Mittal overcame different problems to build a successful telecommunications company. He says the end of central economic planning by the country's government helped his company succeed.

SUNIL MITTAL: "With thirty, thirty-five million dollars that I could access, we went on to built India's second largest telecom company."

Today, Bharti Airtel has thirty thousand employees. The Bharti Group has become India's second largest corporation.

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VOICE TWO:

Brent Goldfarb is a business professor at the University of Maryland. He says all kinds of people work to become entrepreneurs. However, he says most entrepreneurs do not get rich. Most earn less than if they were working for someone else. That was true for Pakistani entrepreneur Ashar Hafeez. He opened his first Tandoori restaurant in Islamabad in nineteen ninety-three. He has advice for other entrepreneurs: "You have to work very hard. And you cannot do it alone. You have to have a very good team with you."

VOICE ONE:

In Iraqi Kurdistan, Suhela Kakil Raza is a mother of four. She began making women's clothes about a year ago. But there were problems finding a place to open her store in her city, Irbil. She had to find an area in Irbil where men did not go. This would permit Sunni Muslim women to come out and buy her products. Now, Suhela Kakil Raza has four employees and she wants to expand. She says she dreams of having a factory. She would also like to operate a school to train her female workers.

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