We have been witnessing an increasing number of entrepreneurship training and workshops being conducted across the country lately and business ideas being pithed simultaneously.
This is a heartening development considering that entrepreneurship creates job opportunities, promotes innovation, and improves the economy.
Beneficiaries of these trainings and workshops include mostly laid-off workers and youth- many are those who have been left without work and income because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Such training, in the present scenario, is not only timely and helpful, but they have also opened up the doors to those people wanting to start successful businesses in the country. This is because many, after such training, at least have the basics of how a business operates, including goal setting and writing business proposals.
Earlier this year, we also saw an initiative to equip Persons with Disabilities with entrepreneurship and vocational skills, for which trainers were trained on entrepreneurship development skills. We also saw access to finance being worked out; such as the start-up loan for De-suups, who have attended the De-Suung Skilling Programme (DSP). De-Suups can now avail start-up loans from the Bank of Bhutan without collateral requirements to start their own businesses in the areas of service, production and manufacturing, agriculture and construction.
These training and workshops are a timely intervention that could help address the unemployment issue in the country, which has only been aggravated by the pandemic. While government jobs continue to remain the most sought after by jobseekers, we must also understand that it is not the job of the government to give jobs. The government, therefore, facilitating these entrepreneurship programs and letting people become entrepreneurs would only go on to contribute to the countryโs economic growth and more jobs obviously.
Such training and workshops are also providing our people the skills to be more innovative and lessons to lead entrepreneurial successes. Even they are abreast now that they have a platform through which they can materialize their ideas into reality. Beneficiaries are also aware that they need not fret about getting a job and that a platform has been rendered where they can be the creators of jobs. Another advantage is that itโs also getting people with attractive ideas recommended for support.
However, there are also a few startups that have been confronting challenges and complaining that most government policies are aimed at bigger businesses and that non-availability of raw materials has been a constraint. Other problems range from finding investors from abroad, lack of financial capital, lack of workshops, training and international exposure, growing informal competitions to restrictive policies and regulation.
Apart from providing these training and workshops, it is important for the government to also facilitate and create avenues where these trained people can turn their ideas into reality.
