Community Level Workshops
Over the past couple of years, a series of workshops were conducted among project beneficiaries with support from partner organizations.
Training and Mentorship Support Sessions for Community Based Partners
In August 2019, The Asia Foundation carried out training and mentorship sessions for its community-based partners, to support them in implementing and facilitating dialogue sessions in a challenging environment. The sessions helped our partners to improve their facilitation skills and their ability to identify and respond to difficult questions that could arise when liaising with business owners.
Following this, our community-based partners conducted a series of workshops in September 2019, for 344 project participants with the objective of building trust and confidence among them; enabling them to build and strengthen relationships that would allow them to further promote social cohesion within their communities. This objective was especially important given the impact of the Easter Sunday attacks, and the strain it had placed on inter-community relations. These discussions supported the project in better understanding the context participants were evolving in following the Easter attacks, and its broader impact on the business community within the Eastern Province.
Business Skills and Gender Equality Workshops
Further to this, additional workshops were conducted by community-based partners in October and November 2019 across all nine project locations in Ampara, Batticaloa and Trincomalee districts. A total of 324 local micro and small enterprise owners (71% female) participated in these workshops during which, participants were supported in identifying obstacles and benefits in their own businesses and learned how they could address the said challenges. As the project focuses on gender integration as an important outcome and given the high participation of female business owners within the project, the views and opinions of women entrepreneurs were shared during all sessions to highlight the challenges faced by men and women in doing businesses.
Training Workshop on Entrepreneurship Development and Preparation of Business Plans
In addition to this, the participants were also introduced to the processes of building proper production, marketing and financial plans. They were supported to develop a risk management plan with the objective of improving their entrepreneurship knowledge and skills. These training workshops also enabled participants to improve their ability to identify the various challenges affecting entrepreneurship and business development, to provide them knowledge on starting a new business and strengthening existing businesses.
