The Bhutanese Leading the way.
Around 140 youth were employed this year through entrepreneurship courses conducted by the labor ministry.
The ministry through its Entrepreneurship Promotion Division (EPD) conducted training and workshops for a week with all the financial institutes, regional offices and beneficiaries to minimize defaults for the supported entrepreneurs and those in the future.
The workshops were conducted with the objective to reduce business failures and improve the businesses established by entrepreneurs.
The program was started in 2009 by supporting 44 business in the highest poverty incidence dzongkhag; Zhemgang, Samtse, Mongar.
The courses were intended to assist unemployed youth in starting income generating businesses for self employment and more importantly to generate employment opportunities.
In line with the 10th Five Year Plan the government had targeted to support 400 youths to take up small business as it is one of the crucial area to solve unemployment.
The main motive behind setting up enterprises was to generate employment for skilled and illiterate laborers in poverty stricken region.
However the MOLHR is coming up with a methodology to develop the curriculum for entrepreneurship courses.
Till now such programs were outsourced to private training institutes due to lack of expertise in the ministry.
A trainee who attended the Comprehensive Entrepreneurship Courses said the short duration courses had assisted with business proposal writing only. Which he said is not satisfactory.
“While we wanted both aspects of business plan and training to be covered but for the fiscal year it was of short duration,” said the trainee.
A labor official said the above mentioned aspects would be incorporated in the course conducted in the future.
The EPD would also come up with a proposal of basic changes in the courses for 11th FYP such as deputing micro financing for basic entrepreneurship course, medium and small finance for comprehensive course and medium and large finance for advanced entrepreneur course which would be for 3 months.
Leki a participant for such a course recommended a realistic approach by fixing a certain period to conduct such courses in order to recruit more youths and curb unemployment.
