What lessons can be learned from the experience of entrepreneurship development in Vietnam? This report argues that providing support through women’s groups and other collaboration groups helps to create an enabling environment for business development. This enables women to learn and share good experiences, thereby building links among individuals and groups, and bringing both individual and collective benefits. Nevertheless, the approach still requires improvement.
Many projects and programmes have made efforts to promote an enabling environment for business development. The most common activities include awareness-raising among different social groups on the importance of public-private partnership. The scope of capacity building activities is diverse, covering various types of organisations from national to community level. Most capacity building activities have been implemented using a participatory approach. Training courses have been well designed using a training needs assessment, evaluating trainees, and collecting information on training needs.
Business development service delivery is one of the key implementation areas for most projects, which provide services via groups of female entrepreneurs, women’s clubs or women’s cooperation groups. Support is provided for market access by organising trade fairs and study tours. Support is also provided for the design of trademarks, product labels, and product quality, and by offering legal and other consultancy.
However, there are a number of shortfalls in the way projects are designed and implemented:
- Many projects do not pay enough attention to assessing the impact of their training courses.
- Information, reports, and other material on the impact of training courses is limited.
- Projects do not offer enough capacity building activities.
In order to improve the outcomes of such projects, the following points should be noted:
- Women’s needs, financial and labour capacity and willingness should be assessed when they apply to join a collaboration group to ensure strong commitment to learn new skills and engage in business or production.
- Management skills and capacity among several key people in women’s clubs should be developed. These people can ensure the project’s sustainability and the group’s development.
- There should be awareness raising activities for the community about the group’s performance, so that members (especially husbands) can understand and support the group’s operations.
- The selection of women wanting to start a business must be based on detailed study of the product’s market.
- The needs of small and medium enterprises must be carefully assessed prior to the design of Business Development Service packages. Such studies should engage local enterprises.
- Where there are women and ethnic minority groups living in poverty, supporting improvements in technical production and product quality through vocational training is a relevant approach.
