Service providers trained in entrepreneurial skills

Advisors from Business Development Centres are undergoing training in various entrepreneurial skills and will, in turn, conduct training for Small and Medium Enterprises in the country.Trainees were introduced to topics related to Strategic Planning, Customer Service and Service Delivery Management, creativity, business idea and opportunity analysis, Intellectual Property and other legal issues, marketing Planning and Management.In an interview, Livingstone Nkuusi SME Senior Development Advisor in RDB, said the training was attended by Business Development Service Staff from ten districts. They include Nyarugenge, Kicukiro, Gasabo, Rwamagana, Kayonza, Ngoma, Gatsibo, Nyagatare, Kirehe and Bugesera.“This training is important, because we are creating a pool of quality business advisors who are really attracted to develop serious business and assist them to grow,” he said.These advisors are established in districts with three advisors in each district that help local businesses to grow by assisting them to develop business plans.The on-going programme is funded by RDB and it’s expected that over 90 advisors will be trained.Other courses are Professional Service Selling, Promotion and advertising, accounting and Taxation for SME’s, financial Planning and analysis, types of funding and Fund Raising, Organizational Planning, Operational Planning, Strategies for growth, managing growth and SME risk analysis.“This is like a mini-MBA, where everything that is required to develop a business will be covered by a group of well-known international consultants who are training our local consultants,” he said.Nkuusi is optimistic that the trainees will offer quality business advisory services to local businesses and make them grow, help them access finance, markets and build the SME’s capacity to manage their own businesses.“Therefore after these training sessions, we shall have created a group of proffessionals that these starting, expanding and dying out businesses can consult in order to stay in business,” Nkusi said.BDCs were set up RDB until last year when RDB entered into a public private partnership and privatised these centers to four business consulting firms where each firm was given a province apart from one which took over Kigali City and Eastern Province.“Most businesses die out because they don’t understand the market they operate in, or entrepreneurs who start a business because they have seen a friend or a neighbour is doing the same,” he said. Improved entrepreneurial skill will in turn, reverse the trend of businesses that start, and die prematurely.

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Service providers trained in entrepreneurial skills