Belgium has a record 9,155 student entrepreneurs, with the number rising by 5 per cent over the past year, business organisation Unizo said on Friday.
Student entrepreneurs are students who run their own business alongside their studies. After a slight dip in recent years, their numbers have now fully recovered. Unizo said the trend was encouraging because students who start a business while studying gain experience and develop the skills, networks and resilience needed to build a sustainable company.
But the organisation also warned against focusing too much on the record itself. Frank Socquet, director of Unizo’s research department, said only a limited group of students still chooses entrepreneurship and that, in an economy that needs more entrepreneurs, the ambition should be to inspire many more young people to start their own business.
Two in three student entrepreneurs are men. Since 2017, their number has more than doubled, while the number of female student entrepreneurs has risen by only half.
Encouraging more young women to take the step into self-employment remains an important area of work and an absolute priority, said the minister for the middle classes, the self-employed and SMEs, Eléonore Simonet of the MR party.
Three quarters of student entrepreneurs are based in Flanders. Nearly half of the students who started their own business are still active as self-employed workers four years later.
Under Belgium’s student entrepreneur status, students under 25 do not pay social security contributions on the first €8,687.03 of annual net income. That age limit will soon be removed.
