Programme to train aspiring entrepreneurs to be extended to 33rd country
Geneva, 20 December 2010 - The Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs of the Russian Federation (Vnesheconombank) and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) signed this afternoon a cooperation agreement to support the establishment of a Russian branch of Empretec, the widely known UNCTAD programme for entrepreneurship development.
The agreement was signed at 4 p.m. by Michael Kopeykin, Deputy Chair of the Bank, and by UNCTAD Deputy Secretary-General Petko Draganov.
Empretec is an integrated capacity-building programme which promotes entrepreneurship and small- and medium-sized enterprise development by fostering entrepreneurial competencies, innovation, and business networking. Since its inception in 1988, the Empretec network has been extended to 32 countries and has assisted more than 200,000 entrepreneurs through local market-driven Empretec centres in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Empretec graduates have started and/or expanded thousands of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and have created hundreds of thousands of jobs. The core Empretec product, the Entrepreneurship Training Workshop (ETW), promotes a methodology of behavioural change that helps entrepreneurs put their ideas into action and helps fledging businesses grow. Empretec also assists local suppliers in their integration into international value chains through its business-linkages programme.
Vnesheconombank is a major development institution in the Russian Federation which helps to implement national government policies aimed at increasing competitiveness of the Russia´s economy, its diversification, investment facilitation, and export promotion. Support SMSE entrepreneurship, of business innovation, and of productive capacity of the SME sector is an important area of the Bank´s activities.
Cooperation between the two agencies is expected to help to unleash entrepreneurship potential in Russia and to boost its contribution to the sustainable economic growth of the country. It also will help to extend the Empretec international network of small entrepreneurs to an important new important region and encourage new cross-boarder business ventures and opportunities for Empretec participants.
