BY EDDIE NSABIMANA

A total of 380 young entrepreneurs and 34 trainers in business development have been equipped with skills in starting, managing and developing businesses with a call on them to present well researched and polished business plans for access to credit from financial institutions.

While passing out the trainees, the Permanent Secretary Ministry of Youth and ICT (MyICT), Rosemary Mbabazi also launched the ‘Start and Improve Your Business’ (SIYB) programme in Rwanda and advised trainees to commit to their businesses with passion, embrace networking, and continue with search for knowledge and good practices that will enhance their business performance.

The SIYB programme is being implemented by the Business Development Fund (BDF), in partnership with the International Labor Organization (ILO), with an ultimate aim of improving viability of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) through sound management principles suitable for the environment of developing countries.

She also urged young entrepreneurs in general to be confident while running their businesses and avoid fearing to fail.

"When starting a business, we don’t want to see it collapse. However, don’t fear to fail. Only passion, treading the right path and patience lead to success.”

Innocent Bulindi, the CEO of BDF, appealed to the trainees to exploit skills acquired into shaping their own businesses and contribute to the attainment of national development aspirations especially EDPRS II, which, among others, targets at least 200,000 off- farm jobs every year.

He also advised them to always come up with well thought out business plans that are bankable and can be implemented. "A number of SMEs fail to access BDF support because they present business plans which are not really well studied, some of which will have already been rejected by banks. I hope these trainings will be helping you to develop and improve your businesses and grow so that you can even employ more people.”

The trainings have been conducted under three SIYB programmes including ‘Generate Your Business’ (GYB) provided to those who don’t have any idea about business but willing to do it, ‘Start Your Business’ (SYB) for potential entrepreneurs with a concrete business idea and, lastly, Improve Your Business (IYB) provided to those who already have businesses but need to improve the management processes for better performance of their business.

The GYB, SYB and IYB programmes have been conducted for a duration of three, five and two days respectively.

Trainees have expressed gratitude towards the gesture and committed to applying the knowledge acquired for betterment of their entities. "Before this training, I had too many business ideas that I failed to translate into business plans. But now, I am able to choose one which can be successful, the target customers and the right product they want. I leave this training with a business idea which I believe BDF will support immediately because I have carefully evaluated it, using the skills I got from the training,” said Emmanuel Vuningoma, a GYB trainee.