The Business Bootcamp is a platform for economic empowerment that serves to promote local entrepreneurship within underprivileged and underserved communities. The establishment of these programs follows from our conviction that peace and development are two sides of the same coin. For peacebuilding to occur as a grassroots process, communities must enjoy a degree of economic autonomy and stability. Conversely, in areas affected by conflict and marginalization, efforts at these negative circles, we have developed the Business Bootcamp as a strategic complement to our peacebuilding work in our target territories.
The program is designed in an integrated fashion to help address the many gaps, obstacles that aspiring entrepreneurs residing in fragile areas may face. In this light, its first component consists in vocational training in the areas of entrepreneurship, ICT and Arts and crafts. The purpose is to disseminate skills that trainees can use to raise their economic prospects in general, for raising their employability, finding a job, increasing their income or creating a business of their own. But the knowledge gap is only one of the challenges faced by aspiring entrepreneurs in our target communities. It is often the case that they have sound ideas based on their understanding of local market needs but have no financial resources to concretize them. We address this issue by holding business plan competitions in which former trainees can pitch projects and hope to be selected for grants that we offer for supporting the creation or strengthening of individual or cooperative businesses. Winners receive financial support as well as backstopping to ensure that their venture can survive the many risks that start-ups will experience in their early period, which are heightened in difficult environments.
