MIT trains 2000 entrepreneurs through EMPRETEC

About 2000 Macro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) have been provided with entrepreneurship training by the Ministry of Industrialisation and Trade (MIT) since the inception of the EMPRETEC Namibia programme in 2019.

Adding to this figure will be 188 MSMEs whose training started on Friday.

The programme, undertaken in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), aims to address the very low entrepreneurial outcomes of our country by training MSMEs and larger enterprises in appropriate entrepreneurial behaviour to ensure that they can create sustainable businesses going forward.

EMPRETEC Namibia was approved by Cabinet in 2019 and has been in operation ever since, although Covid-19 affected our work programme significantly.

“We launched EMPRETEC Namibia’s first training on 16 October 2019, during which we trained 91 MSMEs that year. Out of the 2000 entrepreneurs trained so far, about 30% were from vulnerable categories (disabled, poverty-stricken, etc.). During 2022, such training was conducted in all 14 regions, benefiting 228 MSMEs, while in 2023, the Ministry, through EMPRETEC NAMIBIA, trained 1400 MSMEs,” said MIT Minister Lucia Iipumbu.

“This intervention was delivered by our trained 25 business mentors and coaches, consisting of half the Ministry’s regional staff and the rest from the private sector and academia. Today’s training is a rollout of the much-vaunted Entrepreneurship Training Workshop (ETW), which is the standard training provided globally. Along with our partner EMPRETEC Ghana, we aim to ensure that we complete the necessary training to train up to 180 trainees. We also aim to work with both UNDP and UNCTAD to ensure that EMPRETEC Namibia is certified as a global center by the end of this year.”

In addition, Iipumbu said, the Ministry aims to create a pool of trainers who will become the resource of Namibian in providing training, while in the same vein, work with the Ministry of Higher Education and its agencies to initiate work to accredit the training being offered.”