Trainers set for second round of entrepreneurship training |13 February 2018

Mrs Mohideen (standing) addressing the participants at the launch of the workshop yesterday

The Guy Morel Institute has embarked on its second round of entrepreneurship training which aims to tutor around 200 local entrepreneurs.

Its first step towards this endeavour has been to host a three-day workshop to train a group of associated lecturers who will be conducting these training courses.

The workshop kickstarted yesterday at the Guy Morel Institute in Majoie and, during the next two days, the trainers are expected to become better equipped to teach the participants of the entrepreneurship training.

This entrepreneurship programme itself is a collaboration between the Small Enterprise Promotion Agency (Senpa), the Ministry of Entrepreneurship Development and Business Innovation and the Guy Morel Institute, and is funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB). The training will start as of next week, on Monday February 19.

A total of 505 participants were previously equipped with knowledge and skills in the first round of the entrepreneurship training which was held between September 2016 and March 2017, also sponsored by the AfDB.

“The first round of training was basically creating the appetite for already established businesses and also young entrepreneurs that we want to join the entrepreneurial sector,” the Dean of the Guy Morel Institute, Shella Mohideen, explained.

“I believe we did create the appetite where we have started creating this culture where people have understood that they don’t always have to work for others; you can create wealth for yourself and by that process create jobs for others.”

Hence in a bid to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs and change the societal mindset as well as to cover areas which were lacking in the previous round of training, the Guy Morel Institute negotiated with the AfDB to provide this follow-up session.

The programme proposed this time around contains initial training areas developed for the AfDB programme which are entrepreneurship skills development and entrepreneurship management.

It also contains new additional areas developed by the institute and these include: general business planning, innovation in entrepreneurship, the art of selling, financial management in business and personal development.

“We have had a lot of success stories in our first batch of trainees because we made sure to follow up on some of their plans and mentor them. Moreover the past participants’ evaluations of the training were instrumental in helping the institute to develop these new areas,” stated the director of the Enterprise Centre at the Guy Morel Institute, Marie-Céline Zialor.

However Mrs Zialor added that a repeat of the training was necessary because more than half of the past participants had failed their business plan modules.

“A business plan is one of the essential elements that dictates if a bank will give you a loan or not. The fact that many failed just goes to show that there is a lot more that we have to do for our local entrepreneurial sector.”

The Guy Morel Institute is calling for business start-ups, existing business owners and future entrepreneurs to enroll for the training which will be free of charge, and available on Mahé, Praslin and La Digue.