By Tione Andsen

Lilongwe, August 5, Mana: Financial Inclusion and Entrepreneurship Scaling (FInES) has stressed the need for providing enhanced capacity buildings among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in order to improve their businesses.

FInES Programme Manager, Ralph Tseka made the remarks Friday when he closed a five day Train the Trainer Workshop of Personal Initiative Training at Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe.

He believes that SMEs need to acquire entrepreneurship and mind set development skills for them to perform as expected.

Tseka said most SMEs in the country are failing to grow because they do not have required skills to use in their businesses.

“Most SMES are only interested to develop business plans and use them to acquire loans from the banks but they don’t have prerequisite skills to manage their affairs hence the need for them to be trained,” Manager said.

He said the training aims at training 100 trainers but the first cohort have only engage 27 of them in order to training 3,500 registered SMEs in the country.  

Tseka pointed out that the team of trainers would have a huge task ahead of them in making sure that SMEs are providing with right information and skills to improve their business.

He said the impact of the training would be demonstrated when SMEs would be conducting their business months after being trained.

Doorways Master Trainer, Benjamin Scharweit said the training was hands on and it was mythology which was used.

He said the trainers have been equipped with new skills on how they could handle SMEs in order to improve their status.

One of the Trainees, Barbara Banda said the training has provided a new way of helping the SMEs to make right decisions for their businesses.

She said SMEs should not view finances as barrier to their businesses but they need to view all factors relating to their work.