Providing BDS
In my view,
BDS are realy important in youth entreprenurship, for example, this has been my experience for my organisation. we started off as a small enterprise in 1998 and worked as youths who only had skills in carpentry and no knowledge about business management etc.
But as we went on some organisations started providing information in regard to what we need to put in plce such as the first thing was legality, we were advised to register our organisation as an NGO and letter we were also advised to register as a training centre in order to qualify to offer training to fellow youths.
After registrations the benefit of us having registered our organisation, we started benefiting from TEVETA were most of our Instructors were sent for training. after training of the instructors, the traini9ng at the centre improved and we could manage to raise enough income to sustain the instructors.
on the other hand we did not have adiquente equipment, space, materials and operational funds. we learned a number of skills which includes the proposal writing, stretegic plannning, etc. we receved funding from various donors from our start to now the organisation has received funds more than Euros 200,000.
the BDS, that our organisation received was mainly not in form of money, but was mostly in form of , staff training, providing of equipment, and space as well as advise from many partners including those we are working with in terms of ICTs.
The importance attached here are that, the BDS will enable an enterprise grow and be able to employ, contribute to national economy.
Dear Rabrod,
Many thanks for sharing your experience in this elaborate manner. Your experience points to one more point which we need to make, that in reality BDS for small scale entrepreneurs are facilitated by various and different players. One can provide an aspect of it such as business training, another provider will look at another area such as market information and yet another on facilitating access to finance. This means as BDS providers, we need to know who is providing and what and where, and develoip linkages with other providers. This can lead to a referral mechanism if an entrepreneur needs something which we can not provide. In addition, as facilitators we need to have a directory of various providers so that we can refer young people accordingly. This is an important point.
