Open thoughts | Entrepreneur Support Programs

It seems that there are plenty of organizations and programmes to support poor to create and develop their own businesses with the help of financial support, education or other tools. Some programmes and projects are created by International Labour Organizations, some by international government-financed organizations such as Asia SEED or international social enterprises like EDW: The Cambodian Entreprise Programme and so on. There's also fast growing and widely spreading micro-finance programs like Banking with the Poor to help new entrepreneurs get their company started.

Naturally, it's extremely difficult to get information on all of the ongoing programs and how successful they are especially sitting here in Finland. One can only imagine how hard it must be for the poor Cambodians to get those information without access to the Internet. We doubt the accessibility of the poor to the fund.

After decades of projects and programmes there seems to be still almost no co-operation between the different organizations. In our humble opinion, what is needed now is an easy access to the fund from a collective efforts so that those in need can learn how they can improve their lives instead of waiting for some program to come to their own villages.