The International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Career Development (ICECD) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) have joined hands to develop 100 potential entrepreneurs from the urban slums of Ahmedabad.
The ILO-ICECD initiative of implementing Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) programme is aimed at empowering around 100 potential entrepreneurs from the city’s slums.
These groups of women and men, with low or no education, hail from economically backward communities. They will be given access to new economic opportunities and entrepreneurial skills development, said Hina Shah, Director, ICECD, here on Tuesday.
The population of Ahmedabad is projected to triple from the existing 40 lakh to 1.2 crore by 2026. Almost 40 per cent of the city’s population now lives in slums with little or no access to basic services while an additional 18 per cent live in under-serviced tenements.
The ILO-ICECD partnership will commence the project next month (October 2012) in some slum areas where groups of women and men are engaged in traditional business. ICECD aims to engage them in sectors such as making footwear, garments and handicrafts, food products and other smaller trades.
The same project will be implemented for two years in Phase I in Uttar Pradesh (Sonbhadra and other districts), Maharashtra (Jalgaon, Nashik, Ahmednagar and other districts) and Gujarat. In Phase II, it will be carried out in West Bengal and Karnataka.
ILO had selected ICECD as its partner from among more than 60 national agencies to become its Training Service Providers (TSPs) for the SIYB programme in India.
It targets potential entrepreneurs keen to start or diversify/expand their own business operations but lack a feasible business idea. The training intervention is designed to assist these potential entrepreneurs to find out if they are the right persons to start business, to identify feasible business ideas and to choose the one business idea that matches best their personal entrepreneurial characteristics and their local environment.