26 participants of the School of Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurship (SME) in Zhytomyr received Certificates confirming their successful completion of the course, 13 of them are ATO-participants and internally displaced people.

Recently, an educational project called “School of Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurship” finished in Zhytomyr. The project was initiated by the non-governmental organization GoLOCAL and International Fund “Renaissance”. The implementation of the project was supported by Zhytomyr City Council. The Department of Economic Development acted as a project developer. 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.

A six-day intensive course from the School of SME started in Zhytomyr on 17 January. 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.

Photos showing the presentation of the Certificates to the course levers are available here: http://golocal-ukraine.com/news-uk/.

“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.

*The project “Ensuring the participation of ATO-veterans and internally displaced people in the School of Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurship in Zhytomyr” is supported by the International Fund “Renaissance”.

To get more information on the project, email us on pr@golocal-ukraine.com or write us a message on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GoLOCAL.Ukraine/