KARACHI, Nov 22: The Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authroity (Smeda) and the Sindh’s ministry of youth affairs have joined hands to train youths to start their own businesses after achieving necessary skills and financing from banks.The plan was agreed at a meeting held recently between Secretary Sports and Youth Affairs Shoaib Siddiqui, Muslim Abbasi and Mukesh Kumar of Smeda.

Under the agreement, Smeda will hold awareness programmes (seminar, workshop) etc., in collaboration with the department in major cities, towns and district headquarters.

Interested youth will be selected through these programmes by Smeda for a feasibility stage and subsequent financing to enable them to stand on their own feet. The first programme on awareness will be held in Karachi University.

Under the plan, the ministry will launch a business plan competition for youth in the province and Smeda will provide an outline for the programme by the end of this month.

The department is also working on a plan to support the youth, who do not have business logistics, through setting up of business and technical enterprise incubators, which are common in other parts of the world.

The Smeda will provide a draft PC-1 for the plan by Dec 12. Initially, such centres will be set up in Karachi, Hyderabad and Larkana.

The Smeda will also provide an outline for organising youth exploration visits to various enterprises along with modus of selection. This would help youth familiarise themselves with large and small businesses.

Under the agreement, Smeda will also explore the possibility of developing a feasibility study for small-scale sports goods manufacturing units.

The two sides agreed that development of youth and their engagement in productive activities is a highly important function which requires proper attention and support by the government, as well as corporate sector.

A Smeda official told Dawn on Thursday that the Smeda was already carrying out an activity for youth in collaboration with Shell Pakistan which is aimed at training youths of 18 to 32 years of age in designing small business plans and selecting them for getting financing to start their work.

The training is provided through awareness seminars and workshops by the Smeda which has trained about 10,000 youths so far.

Of them, about 300 have been helped with finance to set up their own businesses.

In Hyderabad, some youths have started bangle export business while others have obtained franchise from mobile phone companies.

The success rate of the business awareness and training is three per cent among the youth because so far only 300 youth have been inducted into self-businesses out of 10,000 trained.