The International Finance Corporation (IFC), through its Rwanda Entrepreneurship Development Program (REDP) has certified 20 trainers of trainers (TOTs) in Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Toolkit learning system.

The trainees, who attended a three day session at Prime Holdings last week, are expected to transfer the knowledge and skills to owners and managers of small, medium and large businesses in the country.

The trained personnel are from KPS Associates - an audit and consulting firm and MAXINET Group Ltd - an international brokerage company, Alain Molens and Associates –a human resource training and management consultancy firm and Centre for Skills Development – specialising in the provision of hands on skills training for businesses. 

IFC says that the training is designed to increase support for entrepreneurs by providing them with management skills and general business knowledge to run their businesses.

"Our objective is to provide small and medium sized enterprises in Rwanda with access to the best breed business management information, tools and training to help them formalise and grow,” said Sylivia Zulu, IFC’s SME Toolkit Program Manager, during a certificate awarding ceremony. 

She added, "we continue to invest in enhancements to the SME Toolkit, thereby increasing the range of services and solutions offered to SMEs”.

"It is an extremely powerful tool that brings out the entrepreneur in everyone. As you work with SMEs use the tool and explore how best the product can be used. SMEs have similar challenges in developing countries,” she said.

Zulu observed that small businesses are the growth engines of economies yet their success rate is not as good as it could be, simply because of lack of access to good business management practices.

"Giving small businesses the information and new collaborative technologies they need, will help them grow and prosper. SMEs in developing countries are faced with a lot of challenges including limited access to information technology which tends to be very expensive but with the SME tool that is also available on CD and this makes it  easily accessible.” she said.

The Web SME Toolkit site enables users to search and browse content, list their businesses, and create Web pages in a searchable business directory.

Users are also able to network by participating in multilingual community forums on key business management topics. The SME Toolkit content can also be distributed on CD.

Molly Rwigamba, the Director of  Capacity Building and Employment at Private Sector Federation (PSF) said that training was timely as the federation is keen on boosting and developing the capacity of SMEs, which account for 90 percent of Rwanda’s businesses.

She observed that such trainings were significant and should be organised continuously to help SMEs develop their capacity and be able to compete on the regional market. 

Rwigamba explained that SMEs continue to face challenges related to customer care, writing good business plans, poor financial management skills and produce low quality goods limiting them from supplying international markets.

"To make sure our SMEs grow, we need to train them on business management. This initiative is going to make it easy for us to train SMEs because we now have own people and we don’t have to hire foreigners,” Rwigamba said, noting that having Rwandan human resource that can train the SMEs makes the program sustainable.

PSF is partnering with IFC to see how the program can be rolled out to all SMEs especially at the local level.

Ends