Over 800 young entrepreneurs from Nyanza, Western, Rift Valley and Eastern provinces have benefited from a five day training on business planning under the second phase of the JITIHADA business plan competition.
The competition, an initiative from the Ministry of Industrialization aims at identifying growth oriented and innovative business ideas that can be nurtured into viable and sustainable industrial enterprises in order to create employment opportunities to Kenyans.
So far, the competition has been carried out in two phases countrywide in all the eight regions
The trainees were selected from a pool of 3,439 applicants from the manufacturing sector and have gone through training in business planning.
While announcing the closure of the national trainings in Kisumu, Jitihada II Team Leader, Bernadette Mungai, announced that the remaining 2,639 applicants who failed to make the cut during the selection process, will also benefit from a similar one-day training to be held on the first week of May in all the 8 provinces.
Mungai said the young entrepreneurs have gained hand-on experience on how to sustainably run their manufacturing businesses, as the training focused on impacting to them knowledge on the fundamentals of a sustainable business plan.
“This is a unique training program as it incorporates both theory and practical aspects of manufacturing to the entrepreneurs, thus boosting their understanding on how they can run their business ventures and put the new knowledge into practice,’’ said Mungai.
The competition is a World Bank funded project and aims at increasing productivity, employment and competitiveness of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises(MSME) through strengthening enterprise skills, market linkages as well as deepening financial access.
The competition is expected to culminate in a gala night slated for May 25th in Nairobi that will see the winner take home 1 million shillings and the first and second runners up bag 750 thousand shillings and 500 thousand shillings respectively.
The project is being implemented in recognition that the MSME sector is the fastest growing source of employment in the country as it is estimated to contribute about 20 percent of the country’s GDP and over 80 percent of the country’s new jobs.
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