100 SMEs benefit from resilience training
ABOUT 100 Small and Medium EnterpriseS (SMEs) from Bulawayo have benefited from a Sustainable and Resilient Enterprises (SURE) capacity building training organised by THE Bulawayo City Council (BCC) in partnership with Bulawayo Chamber of SMEs and International Labour Organisation (ILO)
In an interview on the sidelines of the five-day training which started on Monday and ended on Friday last week, Bulawayo Chamber of SMEs coordinator Mr Nketa Mangoye Dlamini said the training comes as a result of the realisation that many SMEs fail due to issues which include; disasters, poor management and lack of funding.
He said the business sustainability and resilience training will assist SMEs to properly manage their business with disaster management skills.
“What is happening here is that we are training SMEs on business sustainability and resilience. What has been noted is that the failure rate for SMEs is too high, so if we let that go on it might mean we don’t grow as small enterprises and as the economy,” said Mr Dlamini.
“One of the issues which we have realised is people are poor in managing risks and reacting to bad situations be it pandemics like Covid-19 or any other crises, so we are taking SMEs through the process to say they need to be flexible and identify hazards and pre-plan for such issues.”
Mr Dlamini said the failure rate for SMEs have seen one out of four SMEs fail within a one year which he described as bad in terms of SMEs growth.
ILO trainer Mr Shelton Sithole from BCCl said the training covers modules like resilient management, crisis leadership, hazard identification, and business ecosystem where he said the courses equip an SME director to prepare, respond and recover from different crisis and business shocks.
“What this training does is, it empowers the SMEs with the skills to be calm, to be able to respond and to learn and pick out a leaf out of a crisis, come out stronger so that should the same crisis strike, they are more resilient than they were, but also should any other crisis strike, they should be able to better respond,” said Mr Sithole.
“We are fortunate that in Bulawayo there are many groups scattered for the same training, so in total we are training about 100 SMEs, 20 from Umguza and 80 from Bulawayo.”
One of the trainees Ms Mercy Hove who is the owner of Cake Villa Zimbabwe said the training is very important for her as she is going to learn a lot of things which include good leadership and how to respond to crises.
“We are also to make our businesses be able to adapt to changes, and how to be resilient in an unstable economic environment. This training is very good as it will leave our businesses at another level through good leadership,” she said.
The SMEs sector continues to play a critical role in the Zimbabwean economy through creation of employment and contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP).
It is in this background that the Government together with other stakeholders which include development partners continue to offer capacitation through training and finance among other interventions.-chronicle
