On 26 January, twenty-six participants of the School of Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurship were awarded the Certificates confirming their successful completion of the course, 13 of them are ATO-participants and internally displaced people, as press service of Zhytomyr City Council reports.

“On 19 January, an educational project called “School of Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurship” finished in Zhytomyr. It was initiated by the non-governmental organization GoLOCAL and International Fund “Renaissance”. The implementation of the project was supported by Zhytomyr City Council. The project is unparalleled since half of the participants were ATO-participants and internally displaced people. Their participation in the project was absolutely free of charge”, informs Zhytomyr City Council.

A six-day intensive course from the School of SME started in Zhytomyr on 17 December. During a week, the participants studied theoretical issues and developed various business cases together with the experienced coaches and teachers of the School. The second stage lasted for almost a month. It involved the development of new business projects or startups or the improvement of the existing ones, visits to successful Ukrainian enterprises, meetings with managers from different companies and professional mentoring from School coaches. For instance, within the framework of the practical part of the course, the participants visited the leading enterprise of domestic construction industry LLC “Oberbeton – Invest”. This company is one of the largest producers of reinforced concrete constructions in Ukraine. After that, the School participants went to the capital; there they visited the biggest innovation park in Europe, Unit City.

On 19 January, the students-entrepreneurs defended their business projects successfully. They presented their unusual ideas not only to teachers but also to their co-participants. The ideas varied from production of wedding decorations and opening of a steakhouse to IT startups and HR business plans, all of them ready to be launched at any time. This is the feedback on the projects provided by the business coaches of the School of SME.

“We are proud of our participants! They proved again that even being in quite difficult life circumstances (like those that are internally displaced people or ATO-participants) people strive for development and for changing their lives for the better. Course participants managed to elaborate full-fledged business plans ready to implement. This was exactly the goal of our project – to provide the participants solely with useful and applicable information and to teach them how to use this knowledge in practice”, emphasized the Director of GoLOCAL Igor Komendo.

As Житомир.info reported earlier, the project “School of Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurship” started in Zhytomyr in December.