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The Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) project of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) entered a new project phase from last month. In the new, national project phase, project support services will be available to local Business Development Services Organisations all over the country.

The overall objective of the program is to contribute to economic growth and employment creation. The immediate objective of the program is to strengthen the capacity of local Business Development Services organisations to train small-scale entrepreneurs in basic business management, thus enabling these entrepreneurs to start and grow their own businesses.

The SIYB program comprises there inter-linked training packages that can be used by trainers in local organisations to train entrepreneurs how to generate a feasible business idea, how to start a business and how to set up a basic business management system. The training sessions are short, modular, easy to understand and highly participatory and action-oriented, rendering high training impact at low costs. As a result, the SIYB training program enjoys high popularity among business support institutions worldwide' today, the SIYB training packages are used by Business Development Services organisations in more than 80 countries.

The SIYB Sri Lanka project introduces the SIYB program to the local market. The project is implemented by ILO with financial support from the Swedish International Development Agency. The project is backstopped by the Ministry of Enterprise Development, Constitutional Affairs and Investment Promotion.

The pilot phase of the project started in March 2000 in Southern Province. The project adapted and translated the SIYB training packages and materials to Sinhala and Tamil and then introduced the package to organisations and entrepreneurs in the Matara and Hambantota districts. The market response to the new training offer has been very positive. During the pilot phase, the project worked with seven local partner organisations and these organisations reached more than 1000 entrepreneurs in 2001 alone.

With the beginning of the national project phase, the management unit of the project has moved to Colombo but the project maintains satellite offices in Kurunegala and Matara to more effectively serve its local partner organisations in the Northern and Southern Provinces.

Focus in the new phase will be on training local BDS organisations how to use the SIYB training packages maintaining highest technical standards. The project will provide advisory services to these partner organisations how to set up and manage their own SIYB training programs.

Specific emphasis will be laid on the sustanability of SIYB training. The project goal is to enable local BDS organisations over time to recover their training costs while keeping technical standards of training high. To that end, the SIYB project will offer advisory services for BDS organisations on how to professionalise their services, fully unlocking the commercial value of the training product through professional product development, competitive pricing, effective training distribution networks and systematic promotion of the training product. 

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